Grand Old Parachutes

by William Rivers Pitt

    George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. "I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

    Ah, yes, the eloquence we've all missed so much since January. "I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work" has to be tall in the running for first-ballot induction into the Gibberish Hall of Fame, and that quip about terrorists in therapy absolutely pegged the needle on the Irony Meter, as ABC News pointed out. "Interestingly," reported the network, "it was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi jihadi rehabilitation camp - called the "Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling. To decidedly mixed success."

    Well, go figure. It wouldn't be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now, would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no, actually, not really.

http://www.truthout.org/062309A

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