Bush's Rolling Disaster of a Mideast Trip

Piglipstick:

Since his last pathetic attempt to secure some sort of legacy by traveling to the middle east, which was a smashing failure, a lot of people questioned why Bush and his gargantuan entourage would bother doing it again for the second time in five months. As one journalist put it about the last time:

"Bush is heading back to Washington mostly empty-handed, said several analysts and politicians throughout the region. Arab critics deemed Bush's peace efforts unrealistic, his anti-Iran tirades dangerous, his praise of authoritarian governments disappointing and his defense of civil liberties ironic."

Ironic? I'd say arrogantly hypocritical.
Anything changed this time around? If anything it was a worse display of smarmy exceptionalism from the miserable punk, who gets his frat boy jollies throwing his weight around the bar only because he knows his friends will back up his sorry ass.

The most telling hypocrisy came with his love fest in front of the Israeli Knesset. That pathetic dig at Obama can be expected from a small man like Bush - it's been pointed out too often that shallow accusations about "appeasement" have been tossed around all the time by the likes of this wretch to have any meaning left. No, the biggest pretensions about his Israeli suckup was the fact that here was a man whose family got rich by consorting with the nazis during WW2, standing in front of jews and warning the world about dealing with enemies by using nazis as an analogy. All the while deliberately omitting any references to the vicious treatment the Israelis are currently dishing out to the palestinians. Can it get any more hallucinogenic than that?
Maybe, when several right wing knesset members walked out on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert because he wasn't a real zionist like Bush.

By any standard this walking failure is a pathetic joke and the vile MSM spent the entire trip in trying to cover up that fact, leaving middle east political observers stunned over why the hell the whole thing occurred in the first place. As Robert Fisk puts it, the clueless Bubble Boy is positively deranged when it comes to the reality on the ground. In Lebanon:

"The roads were open again; the hooded gunmen had disappeared; the government had abandoned its confrontation with Hizbollah – the suspension of the Shia Muslim security chief at the airport (who bought me a bottle of champagne a year ago, I seem to remember – some Hizbollah "agent" he!) and the abandonment of the government's demand to dismantle Hizbollah's secret telecommunication system was a final seal of its failure – and I opened my newspaper and what did I read?
That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that "al-Qa'ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause".
Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters – I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again – and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again."

It's been said that a statesman never publicly asks for something without knowing in advance what the answer will be. And since our empty suit of a president is the farthest thing fom a statesman his visit to his autocratic buddies in Saudi Arabia was yet another failure. When he showed up with his begging bowl asking them to increase their oil production, King Abdullah gently told our pretend leader to fuck off and fix the american dollar, which is dropping like a brick and the real cause for soaring oil prices.

No doubt the middle east is breathing a fresh sigh of relief as this fool heads back home. As a parting shot in Egypt, where one headline exclaims "Bush Gets Cold Shoulder", he showed up at the world economic forum to lecture a gaggle of political and business leaders about business tactics and freedom. This was where he summed up the whole purpose of this asinine display of intemperate posturing. The trip wasn't anything about peace and after the abject failure of his first disastrous trip it wasn't anything about his murderous "legacy" in his final year in office. It was about warmongering though, in trying to stir up enmity between neighbors. It was also about freedom too - american and Israeli freedom to dictate to everyone else.