What was revealed by that open mike
Robert Scheer
Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
{snips}
BOMBS WERE exploding and innocents were dying, from Beirut to Haifa to Baghdad, and yet George W. Bush managed to pose for yet another photo-op, smiling as he gave the thumbs up at the close of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. Thanks to an unsuspected open mike, however, we caught a glimpse of the mind set of a leader unaccountably pleased with his ignorance of the world.
Bush had started the exchange by noting, absurdly, that, "This is your neighborhood, doesn't take you long to get home." Uh, yeah, incurious George, sure thing. Never mind that St. Petersburg is in Europe, on Russia's northwestern corner, due north of Turkey, and Beijing is on the eastern edge of mainland Asia. "You, eight hours? Me, too. Russia's a big country and you're a big country," he said when corrected, sounding for all the world like an earnest kindergartner, processing new information. "Russia's big and so is China."
But should we be surprised at Bush's poor knowledge of the world he supposedly leads? After all, the blundering of the Bush administration has seriously undermined secular politics in the Mideast and boosted the religious zealots of groups such as Hezbollah to positions of pre-eminence throughout the region, from savagely violent Iraq to the beleaguered West Bank and Gaza Strip.
What is truly "ironic," however, is that the Bush administration, having overstretched our military and generated no foreign policy ideas beyond the willy-nilly "projection" of military force, has become a helpless bystander as the entire region threatens to burn.
full article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/07/19/EDGOBIPV8B1.DTL