Perspective is Everything (Sujatha)

Just when I think that the Holiday goings-on at the White House couldn't present a more revolting contrast to the carnage in Iraq, I come across this : Bad enough that the First Lady was wearing something that looked like a Victorian sofa for the Christmas pics this year, but when 3 other ladies showed up wearing the identical $8500/- costume, it was a woman's worst nightmare come true!
Here is another woman's worst nightmare, just to put things in perspective. Cindy Sheehan doesn't mince words when she writes:

"Yes Laura, et al, there are worse things than what happened at the White House Christmas party this past week. Ask the 25 American mothers who learned that their sons were killed this past week for your husband’s lies and to put obscenely expensive and over the top (not to mention, unflattering) clothes on your backs. Ask the people who are being slaughtered in Iraq and can’t even go buy groceries or attend services in their local places of worship without fearing being blown to a million tiny pieces bombs. Ask the prisoners who have been tortured at such gulags as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Ask the millions of people who go to bed hungry or cold in our very own country every night while you are horrified that someone else found your dreadful dress appealing enough to plunk down over eight grand."

Evidently Mrs.Bush is competing with Marie Antoinette's infamous "Let them eat cake", not just the fashion sense of other rich Republican matrons.

In the meantime, we have the commander-in-chief being treated like a child who could burst into a tantrum at a moment's notice if he did not get his way, living in a bubble and insulated from reality by his close circle and his own mental processes. One wonders when rude reality will burst this bubble, or perhaps he will just escape to a new bubble in Paraguay.

"..... the [Baker-Hamilton] commission generously avoided revisiting the whole question of who got us into this fiasco and how. As the Washington Post put it, "The panel appeared to steer away from language that might inflame the Bush administration." Of course, "inflame" is a word typically associated with street mobs or other irrational actors. The fact that the president can be "inflamed" is no longer considered surprising enough to merit comment.

Indeed, everybody seems to understand that if you want to help amend the disaster in Iraq, the No. 1 rule is that you can't acknowledge it's a disaster in Bush's presence. Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes, the court stenographer of the Bush administration, recently reported that this was a key factor in the hiring of Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Now, I would bet every dollar I own that Gates thinks the war was a mistake. But you can't say that to Bush. "Before hiring him," Barnes wrote, "Bush had to make sure Gates didn't think America's intervention in Iraq was a mistake."

Yes, Mr. President, it's good that you turned Iraq into a Hobbesian inferno of Al Qaeda terrorists and Islamist death squads. It's really, really good!"

                                                                                                               --Jonathan Chait (L.A. Times)

Comments

[m]

It occurred to me this week that the phrase "farcical marmalade" is very difficult to use in a sentence.

I should have mentioned that this was off topic. Way off topic...which does, at least, prove (as your title suggests) that perspective is everything. I need way more of it. I would like some for Christmas, in fact. Hi.

[Sujatha]

Gotten over your hangover yet, m? Good luck inserting 'farcical marmalade' in a sentence ;)