Funferal

This is not the end

There’s so much to write about this morning, following Bush’s speech last night. First, I saw the first half on the TV in my building’s laundry room, and couldn’t stand to watch the second half. I must admit that the speech was quite well crafted – lots of constituencies touched on – but is there a worse orator than Bush Jr? Maybe its the teleprompter, but here – in one of the most important speeches of his career – he couldn’t get the flow of a single sentence right. He’d stop as if at the end of a sentence, only to continue (presumably when the next words appeared, or he remembered to look at the next line) as if on a new sentence.
I know that I’m not a perfect speaker myself, but I would hope that in his position – after so much practice, and with the importance of the occasion – I would be able to sound like I knew what I was talking about, rather than obviously reading someone else’s words. And given that the speech has presumably been planned for a while, I thought Bush might at least have given it a run through.
But that’s just ephemera. The speech itself was full of mendacity – there’s an interesting analysis of some of the points on ZNet.
And now we see that Clare Short has decided, inexplicably to back down – she is rightly being derided by none less than the BBC as someone who will never be trusted again to make a rational decision. No doubt Blair will keep her around as long as she’s convenient. On the other side, there was Robin Cook’s impressive speech, which I missed, and Chretien’s comments to the Canadian parliament, which I again saw in my laundry room. The latter were stirring, and interesting for the respect expressed for parliament – so rare these days.
Of course, there;s always the depressing news that depleted uranium will be used by the US. And I know “it’s war”, but the contempt expressed for the expected deaths of Iraqi soldiers was contemptible….