George Bush, pillock of the free world

Robin Williams, on Bill Maher’s show: “George Bush was in the same National Guard unit as Bigfoot.”

Bush says that “We do not accept a false caricature that divides the Western world between an idealistic United States and a cynical Europe.” I’m sure the Europeans will be glad to hear that, in their cynical way. He goes on, “America and Europe are the pillars of the free world.” This is, of course entirely meaningless--what does it mean to be a “pillar”?--but it’s funny to see the re-emergence under Bush of the Cold War phrase “free world.”

There are even more insulting ways to divide the world, and Secretary of War Rumsfeld used one a few days ago when he said that “China is a country that we hope and pray enters the civilized world in an orderly way without the grinding of gears”. His handlers later rushed to explain that he hadn’t actually called China uncivilized, although he obviously had.

A quote I’d missed, from the wife of John Negroponte, last year about his support of Honduran death squads: “I want to say to those people, ‘Haven’t you moved on?’ To keep fighting all that is old hat.”