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>From the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
>
>by Mike Carlton
>
> George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was
> every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of
triumphalism
>probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French

>in Notre Dame in 1804.
>
> The little Corsican corporal had a few decent
>victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so
>this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his
>born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds
>the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his

>scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair
>warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his
>sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the
>environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to
>his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.
>
> Difficult to know what was more repellent: the
>estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it stumped up by

>Republican fat-cats buying future presidential favours), or the sheer
>crassness of its excess when American boys are dying in the quagmire of

>Bush's very own Iraq war.
>
> Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham
>Lincoln's second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none,
>with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had prettymuch won

>the Civil War by that time.
>
> In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his
>fourth-term speech with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be

>simple and its words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent
>minutes, then went off to a light lunch, his wartime victory almost
>complete as well.
>
> But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning
>nothing, the dumbest and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren

>Harding died in 1923, Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq war to
>neighbouring Iran.
>
> Condoleezza Rice did admit to the US Senate this
>week that there had been some "not so good" decisions. But the more I
>see of her gleaming teeth and her fibreglass helmet of hair and her
>perky confidence, the more I am convinced that back in the '60s she
>used to be Cindy Birdsong, up there beside Diana Ross as one of the
>Supremes of Motown fame. I don't think it's a good idea to let her make

>a comeback as Secretary of State.
>
> The war in Iran is under way already, if we believe Seymour
>Hersh, the distinguished investigative writer for The New Yorker
>magazine.
>
> Hersh reported this week that clandestine US
>special forces have been on the ground there, targeting nuclear
>facilities to be bombed whenever Bush feels the time is ripe.
>
> "The immediate goals of the attacks would be to
>destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran's ability to go nuclear,"

>he wrote, quoting reliable intelligence sources.
>
> "But there are other, equally purposeful, motives
>at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the
>Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on
>Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious
>leadership."
>
> Naturally, Pentagon flacks rushed out to deny all.
>But then they did that when Hersh broke the story of the My Lai
>massacre in Vietnam in 1968, and again when he revealed the torture of
>Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. A tussle for the truth between Hersh and

>the Pentagon is no contest.
>
> What terrifies me most is the people planning this new

>war. The CIA professionals have been frozen out: too weak and wimpy for

>the Bushies.
>
> The Defence Secretary, the incompetent Donald
>Rumsfeld, has seized control, aided by two Pentagon under-secretaries.
>One is Douglas Feith, a mad-eyed Zionist largely responsible for the
>post-invasion collapse of order in Iraq, a civilian bureaucrat
>memorably described by the former Centcom commander, General Tommy
>Franks, as "the f---ing stupidest guy on the face of the Earth".
>
> The other is army Lieutenant General William G.
>(Jerry) Boykin, whose name also rings a bell. Jerry is a born-again
>Christian evangelical, a three-star bigot who, in his spare time,
>stumps the country in full uniform, preaching that America's enemy is
>Satan, Allah is a false idol, and that George Bush has been ordained by

>the Lord to rout evil.
>
> "He's in the White House because God put him there
>for a time such as this," Jerry told a prayer meetin' in Oregon just a
>while back.
>
> Be very afraid.
>
> (c) 2005 The Sydney Morning Herald