(no subject)

[selenak]

Ah, national priorities. From what I can see, the things early reviews of Bush's memoirs tend to mention a) his direct approval of waterboarding and continuing conviction this is okay, and b) foetus-in-a-jar incident with is mother. Then it differs. The first detail I saw in an American review was how being called a racist by rapper Kanye West was the worst moment of his presidency. Brits tend to mention he still loves Tony. Meanwhile, our own Süddeutsche Zeitung today has a headline saying "Schröder calls Bush a liar" because W. said good old Gerhard assured him Germany would support an Iraq invasion and then did a 180% turnaround when Bush wanted to invade. Schröder is all indignant "did not!", of course. Now, I rank the veracity of both men about equally (low), but in this case I tend to believe Gerhard S. and his version that he said Germany would support an Iraq invasion only if it happened among an UN mandate a la Afghanistan. Why? Because Schröder & Fischer had a hell of a time getting the Afghanistan one through parliament and that one was covered by the UN. There was absolutely no way they would have gotten parliamentary approval for W.'s bloody boys' own adventure in search of non-existing weapons of mass destruction, and they did want to win elections, you know. Still, given that Schröder is the smoothtalking type of (ex) politico it's interesting that he actually phrased his rebuttal as bluntly as that instead of just declaring something more diplomatic along the lines of "the former US president misremembers" as opposed to "the former US president lies". (I guess once you're earning money courtesy of Russian oil companies, you don't have to bother with diplomacy anymore...)

My absolutely favourite reaction to the Bush memoirs is this poem by rozk.