December 27, 2010 journal, a ghost written book by Republicans thief American loser. This is the bloodiest idiot of my adult life yet he is walking free to the U.S. is a disgrace. To God Almighty he is also a disgrace as a lying cussing reprobate sign of the end time. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n01/eliot-weinberger/damn-right-i-said (How disgusting) From London Times Book Review-Elliott Weinberger-Decision Points by George W. Bush. Virgin, 497 pp, £25.00, November 2010, ISBN 978 0 7535 3966 8 In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, 'What is an author?' The 2, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League - novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior's general ignorance of all things, except for professional sports, naturally extended to the nation known as France. On his first trip to Paris in 2002, Junior, now president of the United States, stood beside Jacques Chirac at a press conference and said: 'He's always saying that the food here is fantastic, I'm going to give him a chance to show me tonight.' Foucault found his theories embodied, sometimes unconvincingly, in writers such as Proust or Flaubert. He died in 1984, while Junior was still an ageing frat boy, and didn't live to see this far more applicable text. For the questions that he, even then, declared hopelessly obsolete are the very ones that should not be asked about Decision Points 'by' George W. Bush (or by 'George W. Bush'): 'Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?' Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush's daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of 'trusted friends'. Foucault: 'What difference does it make who is speaking?' 'The mark of the writer is nothing more than a singularity of his absence.' As a postmodern text, many passages in the book are pastiches of moments from other books, including scenes that Bush himself did not witness. These are taken from the memoirs of members of the Bush administration and journalistic accounts such as Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and Bush at War. To complete the cycle of postmodernity, there are bits of dialogue lifted from Woodward, who is notorious for inventing dialogue. Occasionally, someone on Team DP will insert a lyrical phrase - the tears on the begrimed faces of the 9/11 relief workers 'cutting a path through the soot like rivulets through a desert' - but most of the prose sounds like this: I told Margaret and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that I considered this a far-reaching decision. I laid out a process for making it. I would clarify my guiding principles, listen to experts on all sides of the debate, reach a tentative conclusion, and run it past knowledgeable people. After finalizing a decision, I would explain it to the American people. Finally, I would set up a process to ensure that my policy was implemented. There are nearly 500 pages of this, reminiscent of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences, and Kenneth Goldsmith with his 'uncreative writing', such as a transcription of a year's worth of daily radio weather reports. Foucault notes: 'Today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression.' Even the title of the book unchains the signifier from the signified. 'Decision points' is business-speak for a list of factors, usually marked by a bullet in PowerPoint presentations, that should be considered before making a decision. There are no decision points in Decision Points. Despite what is claimed above, Bush never stops to consider. He is the Decider who acts impulsively and 'crisply', drawing on his 'moral clarity'. In the scariest line in the book, he has been allowed to let slip that his motive for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was simple revenge, surely the least desirable emotional quality one would want in a world leader with access to nuclear weapons. About 9/11 the text says: 'My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass.' Team DP has indeed created 'a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears'; one learns almost nothing about George W. Bush from this book. The names of hundreds of other people are mentioned, almost always in praise - it is, in its way, the world's longest prize acceptance speech - but none of them, outside of the Bush family, has any life as a character. Each new person is introduced with a single sentence, noting one or more of the following: 1) Texan origins; 2) college athletic achievements; 3) military service; 4) deep religious faith. The sentence ends with three personal characteristics: 'honest, ethical and forthright'; 'a brilliant mind, disarming modesty and a buoyant spirit'; 'a statesman, a savvy lawyer and a magnet for talented people'; 'smart, thoughtful, energetic' (that's Condi); 'knowledgeable, articulate and confident' (that's Rummy); 'a wise, principled, humane man' (Clarence Thomas); and so on. Then the person does whatever Bush tells him to do. Bush is the lone hero of every page of Decision Points. Very few spoken words are assigned to him, outside of the public records of speeches and press conferences, and in nearly all of them he is forceful, in command, and peeved at the inadequacies of his subordinates: 'What the hell is happening?' I asked during an NSC meeting in late April. 'Why isn't anybody stopping these looters?' 'By the time Colin gets to the White House for the meeting, this had better be fixed.' 'We need to find out what he knows,' I directed the team. 'What are our options?' 'Damn right,' I said. 'Where the hell is Ashcroft?' I asked. 'Go,' I said. 'This is the right thing to do.' 'We're going to stay confident and patient, cool and steady,' I said.'Damn it, we can do more than one thing at a time,' I told the national security team. As I told my advisers, 'I didn't take this job to play small ball.''This is a good start, but it's not enough,' I told him. 'Go back to the drawing board and think even bigger.' 'We don't have 24 hours,' I snapped. 'We've waited too long already.' 'What the hell is going on?' I asked Hank. 'I thought we were going to get a deal.' 'That's it?' I snapped. As Foucault says, 'The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse.' This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness); no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer ('imperative', because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by 'friendly fire' in Afghanistan; no 'Total Information Awareness' from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on 'abstinence education'. It does not deal with the Cheney theory of the 'unitary executive' - essentially that neither the Congress nor the courts can tell the president what to do - or Bush's frequent use of 'signing statements' to indicate that he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed. It is astonishing how many major players from Bush World are here Missing in Action. Entirely absent, or mentioned only in passing, are Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Yoo, Elliott Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O'Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel Alito, Ari Fleischer, Alberto Gonzales, Denny Hastert, John Negroponte and Tom Ridge. Condi and Colin Powell are given small parts, but Rummy is largely a passing shadow. No one is allowed to steal a scene from the star. The enormous black hole in the book is the Grand uppet master himself, Dick Cheney, the man who was prime minister to Bush's figure head president. In Decision Points, as in the Bush years, he is nearly always hiding in an undisclosed location. When he does show up on scattered pages, he is merely another member of the Bush team. The implicit message is that Washington was too small a town for two Deciders. Only twice in this fat book does one get a sense of Cheney's presence. He complains about Bush's refusal to grant a pardon to Scooter Libby: 'I can't believe you're going to leave a soldier on the battlefield.' (But the scene is taken from a news article, where the line is not attributed to Cheney but to an anonymous staffer, and spoken about Bush, not directly to him.) And there is one glimpse at how adept Cheney was at pushing Bush's macho buttons: Dick Cheney was concerned about the slow diplomatic process. He warned that Saddam Hussein could be using the time to produce weapons, hide weapons, or plot an attack. At one of our weekly lunches that winter, Dick asked me directly: 'Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?' That was his way of saying he thought we had given diplomacy enough time. I appreciated Dick's blunt advice. I told him I wasn't ready to move yet. 'Okay, Mr President, it's your call,' he said. Then he deployed one of his favourite lines. 'That's why they pay you the big bucks,' he said with a gentle smile. If Cheney has been left on the cutting room floor, the surprise supporting actor is Dad. We all know too much about the Bush Family Drama: Dad the Phi Beta Kappa student and star collegiate athlete, Junior at the same schools a mediocre goofball who would never make the team and was reduced to being a cheerleader; Dad the World War Two fighter pilot hero (actually considered a coward outside of Kennebunkport, but that's another story), Junior mainly AWOL from the dinky Texas Air National Guard; Dad the successful oil man, Junior losing fortunes on dry wells, continually bailed out by Dad's friends. When the black sheep loser - and not his reliable brother Jeb, who was groomed for the task - bizarrely became president, Junior made a point of selecting two unilateral Pax Americana hotheads, Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom diplomatic Dad couldn't stand. His obsession with taking out Saddam - which, contrary to Decision Points, was evident on Day One of the administration - was widely seen as a reaction to Dad's 'failure' (according to the Project for the New American Century crowd) to invade Baghdad during the Gulf War. Even Dad's best friend, Brent Scowcroft, came out publicly against the imminent war. During the presidency, Junior was touchy on the subject, and famously replied, when asked if he sought his father's advice: 'I appeal to a higher father.' Unexpectedly, Dad is everywhere in the book"-Enough of this Bush crap Prince Charles future king if England has a future has 149 servants, 29 personal servants. It is time for the monarchy to end, it will end soon when this period of power collapses. 139 patrol officers were killed this year in the line of duty and it will probably get worse. They do not report how many people were killed from speeding patrol cars or from the service revolvers. Neither does the American Army report how many people they kill. The federal government is pushing states they say to catch up with drunk drivers while 8 out of 10 people are reported to refuse a breathalyzer test. It is the states that license the alcohol then arrest people for drinking it. It's a weird lopsided world isn't it. Some states are now putting judges on the road to sign search and seizure orders then have nurses on hand to draw their blood for testing their alcohol level because it is the most profitable type of business. I see on TV around here that they have roadblocks and stick the tester right under the nose of drivers. Could it be that all law-enforcement is violating rights? Drunk drivers are put in jail and fined awfully high rates to get out and get their license back. In recent years a group of Highway Patrol officers were leaving a Christmas party in Myrtle Beach and crashed into a motorist. Officers on duty fined the motorist but a later a investigation found the motorist was falsely charged while that driver officer was drunk. Gasoline is exploding in cost thanks to the greed of the roaring stock market investors. My daddy tell me about a man winning in Las Vegas but died while the slot machine was spitting out quarters at him and continued to spin out quarters in his lap. That machine do not have enough quarters to entice me to put quarters into it. The day the dollar dies Wall Street-FED will be flourishing and Las Vegas will continue to be rolling with gamblers. I have given up trying to draw a distinct difference between the Esau Edomites and the Children of Israel. All Jewish people stand to profit from the bloody Zionist wars and the banks of money. The Trinity of Evil is obvious and a few of them crying foul now is not sufficient to save them from being all in one. Where is recorded any objection to the Tal- mud. We cannot say the worshipers of Moloch sacrificing their children in the belly of the beast were Edomites! Of course they are Israelites! All Israel is sucking American blood. They will cause a major disruption of America exactly like they did to Russia when Lenin took over as a art about it eyewash all total communism will be the end result. The super Right continue to arm and I predict they will follow Fox even the tea baggers to turn this country upside down.