I think Americans have sacrificed

I guess Bush won’t accept Ahmadinejad’s proposal of a live debate. They could have sold that one on pay-per-view and rebuilt New Orleans with the proceeds.

Yesterday Bush was interviewed by Brian Williams, and I’ve finally found where NBC was hiding the transcript. Williams asked if he shouldn’t have asked the American people to make some sort of sacrifice, possibly a goat, after 9/11. Bush:

Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.

Those things are not sacrifice. Sacrifice is something people do actively, voluntarily; the things Bush enumerates are things that people endure passively. A passive, demobilized citizenry, which experiences The War Against Terror (TWAT) only as something they see, as Bush often says, on their television screens, as a consumer good, which only turns out for one “accountability moment” every four years, that’s the sort of citizenry that suits Bush.

Asked whether he ever gets advice from his father:

He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have [!]. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”

He makes it sound like a really crappy finger-painting his father has to coo over and put up on the refrigerator, then shudder every time he gets a glass of milk.

Actually, Bush the Elder not chewing out Chimpy for his massively incompetent foreign policy, now that’s a sacrifice.