It’s embarrassing to have a president who’s so universally loathed. Bush arrives in Austria today and will be greeted by scorn and widespread protests, not to mention Cindy Sheehan. Random posters have been up across Vienna since April, depicting Bush’s face and a German-language caption reading “A mass murderer is coming.”
How extraordinary that even when Bush visits allies abroad he’s not well received. He was heckled in the Australian Parliament in October 2003, and weeks later, lambasted for insulting the Queen when his security personnel trashed Buckingham Palace. He was greeted by hostile headlines and throngs of placard-carrying protestors in Ireland in 2004, then charged with torture by a legal activist group in Canada later that year. Bush encountered massive protests under the slogan “Not Welcome” in Germany in 2005, and faced banners depicting him as a devil, a vampire and a warmonger at the November 2005 Summit of the Americas in Argentina.
Bush is in Austria today for a brief US-European Union Summit plugged by the State Department as “combating an ideology of violence with a positive vision of freedom, democracy and opportunity.” Humorous in light of recent revelations that the CIA colluded with various European countries on the alleged kidnapping and secret transfer of terror suspects to countries that use torture.
But the show must go on. Expectations for Bush’s visit are low, however, and his farcical jaunt to Iraq last week didn’t help. The Iraqi Prime Minister wasn’t informed about Bush’s visit until five minutes before they met, proving that the supposedly sovereign government can’t even control who enters its country.
Bush said he visited Iraq last week to look Prime Minister Maliki “in the eyes” and determine his dedication to freedom - reminiscent of how Bush looked Russia’s President Putin “in the eye” back in 2001 to “get a sense of his soul.” But Bush won’t be practicing his mystical eye-looking quality in Vienna; the city’s under a security lockdown with huge sections cordoned off lest Bush come face-to-face with the growing hordes of angry protestors.
It’s hard to imagine where Bush actually is welcome. A Pew opinion poll released last week found that citizens across the globe are losing confidence in the US leader, with his approval ratings plummeting, for example, to 15% in France, 7% in Spain and a 3% in Turkey. Support for the administration’s militaristic policies has also dramatically waned, with majorities in only 2 of the 14 countries surveyed favoring the so-called war on terror, and similar majorities citing the US military presence in Iraq as a greater threat to world peace than Iran.
In other words, people around the world are beginning to understand that the deteriorating security situation in Iraq is linked to the sharp increase in global terrorism – and a potential threat to their own safety. And they wouldn’t be heartened by Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) April 2006 assessment of National Counterterrorism Center data, which found an increase of over 5,000% in the number of global terrorist attacks and over 2,000% in the number of terrorist-related deaths in the three years following the US invasion of Iraq. Yet the administration says the war on terror is making us safer.
It’s troubling that as international disapproval of Bush and his administration’s policies increases, so does anti-Americanism in general; the Pew poll found that “favorable opinions of the United States” have plummeted since last year in the majority of the 15 countries it surveyed, including in Germany, Russia and India.
So perhaps it’s fitting that Bush is now visiting Austria, a country which at one point was a powerful empire controlling lands as far flung as Mexico, but today fights to have its voice heard on the world stage. The lesson is clear: Imperialistic overreach and its requisite focus on military power can eventually make the mighty crumble.
http://www.heatherwokusch.com
Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now, which went to #1 on Amazon's political activism charts in December 2007 (www.progressiveshandbook.com). Heather can be reached at www.heatherwokusch.com.
The plunge in the standing of the American people around the world is easy to explain. The majority of Americans can't be bothered to worry their dull little heads about what Bush is up to. They are too busy watching junk on tv and shopping for things that they don't need. They are used to being apolitical and whatever Bush does is all right with them, they trust this "moral leader" to do the right thing. This is becoming clear to people around the world, they are beginning to realize that the American people are enablers of Bush perfidy, and so the poll numbers are sinking. Those of us who are awake are in the minority and no one cares what we think. Tolstoy describes patriotism in its simplest form as "a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and slavish enthralment to those in power". Sound familiar?
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Regina Carpenter (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 38 comments)
on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 3:22:37 PM
Bush an embarrassment?
I don't know what to say.
We Americans have the right to vote, we have a free press, we have civil liberties, we have leisure, and we have a government that is bombing children with the most sophisticated and powerful forces the world has ever seen.
EMBARRASSED, EMBARRASSED, EMBARRASSED,
How about ashamed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Robert Chapman
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Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 557 comments)
on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 3:56:36 PM
We Americans have the right to vote, we have a free press, we have civil liberties, we have leisure, and we have a government that is bombing children with the most sophisticated and powerful forces the world has ever seen.
EMBARRASSED, EMBARRASSED, EMBARRASSED,
How about ashamed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
.....I think you mean..Americans think they have the right to vote, when in fact that right only supports the Republican Diebold executives to steal elections from the majority. I think you mean the big media institutions have been bought and paid, leaving a press that pumps out propaganda to serve the interest of Bush corruption. Free press is like sending notes in the mail isn't it? I think you mean civil liberties, in concern to eliminating affirmative action, building more prisons to house blacks, and letting rich blacks who committ murder walk the streets? I'll have a glass of OJ, thanks! Yes and the best of all we have leisure. The leisure to allow crooks to do the things they do, in order for us to enjoy our leisure. Sounds more like bondage to me, as we leisurely sip our pina colata's seeing kids and families blown to pieces in Iraq hoping that never happens in our neighborhood. Better over there than here. Embarrassed, ashamed? Hardly....
More like that's the American Way. Woops...shhhh here comes shithead Bush, he wants to tell us some more good things about his New World Takeover.
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Dom Jermano (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 40 diaries, 934 comments)
on Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 7:12:28 AM
