Bush's cheap speech repeat
Sunday Star-Times, Auckland, September 30, 2001
I was going along with George Bush the Younger's speech last week marvelling at his sudden command of the moment, even while knowing that somebody had written the speech for him.
Then he did something that caused my memory to jump. That was the moment when he held out the badge of George Howard, a cop who died in the catastrophe. The cop's mother, Arlene, had given Bush the badge.
Bush said: "Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this...It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end."
And I was back on a cool October day in 1988 in Christ the King High School on Queens and George Bush the Elder was on the stage holding up officer Edward Byrne's badge. Byrne had been killed in Jamaica. Byrne's father had given Bush the son's badge. Bush was running for president against Michael Dukakis.
"Dukakis wouldn't understand the grief of a dead cop's mother," he said. "This helps define the man I'm running against. He doesn't understand police. I do."
He used the badge to inflame an auditorium that was crowded with high school girls, who got up on their seats and shrieked" "Death penalty! Capital punishment."
Now here was George Bush the Younger, like the
father before him, holding up the badge of another dead cop.
I would have to bet that Bush the Younger remembered it
and dug up the badge the other night. I didn't like it.
I detested the cheap move when Bush the Elder made it
first and I detested it the other night when the Bush the Younger departed from
his valid attempts at loftiness in time of high danger and reverted to the cheap
know-nothing who had brayed that he wanted this bin Ladendead or
alive.
Just in the hours before the speech, he was talking someplace in Washington and he stumbled and mispronounced and mangled his own tongue. Lord, this is the dumbest we've ever had, you thought.
Then at night, with a speech written for him that he read from a prompter, he was comforting and nearly inspiring. Still, the speech was more about money than dead Americans. At times, it sounded as if the nation had its wallet stolen instead of being bombed.
Not once did the people who wrote the speech have Bush mention that this was the greatest security lapse in the nation's history. Blame the airlines and insurance companies who for years bribed senators in Washington to keep regulations off, while they hired security people from outside companies and McDonald's pay.
Those security people got $US5.15 an hour with
no medical cover or holidays.
Then you
wonder how foreign murderers can get on planes. Now, more than 6500 dead and
missing later, they are going to put the security where it should be, under the
federal government.
On television, one of these people billed as truly brilliant observers, historian Douglas Brinkley, said the badge was a great gesture by Bush because it brought him so close to people, or whatever. It was obvious that he didn't know the history of the held-up badge.
Waving a badge may seem like a small complaint about politicians. What harm is there in holding up a cop's badge, even when contrived? Maybe a lot.
You might go back to the night in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson said the North Vietnamese torpedo boats had just attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin and tried to blow them all up. Because they did such a dastardly thing - they even put a bullet hole in the American flag! - he needed a resolution from the Senate and House to allow him to retaliate.
Nobody died in the Gulf of Tonkin. Perhaps nobody shot with more than small arms at the destroyer and the flag. That's if they shot at all. But the resolution led to a war that left more than 50,0000 American soldiers dead and maybe a million Vietnamese troops and civilians.
And in using the badge of a dead cop, Bush was playing to an emotional America when all strength in words should come from understatement.
During the Cuban missile crisis, columnist Walter Lippmann said: "The American people want the thrill of the invasion headlines without having to read the casualty list on the following days."
The trouble this time is we have had the
casualty lists and now wouldn't mind seeing the headlines about an
invasion.
The cop's badge and the fraud
lines, slipped into a speech at such a time, were dangerous and heedles.
At a time when you need every single person,
somebody with a memory thinks he's he's being had and loses confidence. That
could have happened the other night.
-Featurewell Syndication
