Your Number’s Up
‘IT is a mark of the yellowness of the American media that the chief opposition to President Bushs virulently right-wing administration has come from the formerly apolitical editor of a formerly apolitical style magazine.
Most first-class passengers just get slippers |
Where Michael Moore rants and raves about Bush and his cronies, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter tries to undermine the regime with a barrage of statistics.
And he has collected them in a new book, called What Weve Lost, much of which is reprinted in this mornings Independent.
Dubya last night appealed to the American electorate to give him four more years in which to roll back the frontiers of freedom, to build a safer world and a more hopeful America.
This more hopeful America is one in which, as the Indy records, 34.6 million people live below the poverty line, in which the richest 1% of the population own 40% of the countrys wealth.
It is an administration that has presided over the loss of 2.3m jobs in three years (compared with 22m created during Bill Clintons eight years in the White House).
This is a President whose tax cuts saved the average member of his cabinet $42,000 last year, while 49% of the country found their taxes had actually gone up.
And this is a leader who has spent a total of 500 days away from the White House, including a 28-day holiday in August 2001 and again in August 2003. The average American gets 13 days a year.
But it is not just in numbers that Bushs appalling record as President is condemned.
The wife of one of George Snrs former confidants revealed yesterday that George Jnr was transferred from the Texas National Guard to Alabama because his drunken behaviour was embarrassing his dad.
The Guardian hears Linda Allison reveal that she never saw Dubya in uniform and had no idea he was even supposed to be in the national guard.
Georgie was raising a lot of hell in Houston, getting in trouble and embarrassing the family, she says, and they just really wanted to get him out of Houston.
And on Sunday, says the paper, a former lieutenant governor of Texas will admit that he pulled strings to get Bush in a unit of the national guard known as the Champagne Unit because it had so many sons of prominent politicians and businessmen.
Yet, it is Vietnam veteran John Kerry who is forced to defend his war record, while somehow Bush escapes scrutiny.
Go figure, as they say on the other side of the Atlantic…’
Posted: 3rd, September 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink