Liberal Blindness Destroyed both the Bush and Obama Legacies

It is the major historical irony of our new American century, but one I’ve seen nowhere remarked.

The legacies of both this century’s first conservative president, George W. Bush, and of his left-liberal successor Barack Obama were already in tatters as their tenures ended. The irony is that both administrations undid themselves through policies only made possible by the heavy sway certain liberal myths wield in our political life.

I would call the culprit simply liberal blindness--a blindness deeply ingrained among us and one seen, as I hope to show, most clearly in the liberal mind's fatal tendency to disconnect itself from rigorous analysis of culture. Philosophically induced, our liberal refusal to look squarely at culture destroyed both the Bush and Obama legacies.

How did it fall out in the two cases?

For the Bush administration, liberal thought induced a fatal naivety as regards political possibilities in Iraq. Both the extent of naivety, and the world-historical tragedy it led to, would be hard to overstate. The apologists of regime change and nation building kept repeating: “We will be welcomed as liberators” and “All people desire freedom.” But only a deep self-induced ignorance of the cultural and religious makeup of Iraq could allowed policymakers to assert that the Iraqi state, once freed of Baathist rule, would transform itself into a stable democracy. We know how it ended: millions dead (including scores of our own citizens) civil war, the rise of ISIS.

The culprit here was the entrenched liberal myth that all cultures are somehow naturally “on the way” to western-style democracy. Were it not for the sway this notion held, the nation-building argument could never have been formulated relative to the tense, divided territory called Iraq. Blinded by myth, we proceeded to shoot ourselves in the foot. Both we and the Iraqis are still bleeding from our wounds.

Unaccountably, even the lessons that could have been learned from the recent fall of communist Yugoslavia and the bloodbath of ethnicities that ensued there carried no weight in our political debates going in. A smart high schooler could have seen that lesson (the fall of an authoritarian state in an ethnically and religiously divided territory is a sure-fire recipe for civil war) but our pundits and leaders could not. Mythical thinking prevailed.

The second area in which the Bush legacy was undone thanks to liberal myth relates to the management of the US economy. Free-market fundamentalism, a myth tradition according to which markets are somehow natural, self-regulating organisms, had during the Clinton years led to the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Of course Bush and his appointees were fine with that massive deregulatory move, as they shared the thinking that made it possible. Planted in the 1990s, the poison poppies of Wall Street excess burst in Bush’s second term, and on the back of his pipe-dream venture in Iraq, this second liberally-induced disaster ensured Bush’s legacy would be one of massive bungling.

Just as the liberal consensus had failed to consider the cultures of Iraq, so they failed to consider the culture of Wall Street. There was no sufficient thought of what might really happen if the foxes were left to guard the henhouse. Markets, according to the meme, are naturally self-regulating systems.

Those were the Bush years. But Obama’s legacy was similarly undone by liberal blindness. The myth that ultimately undid what could have been the Obama-Clinton years relates to liberal notions of “progress"--specifically that ingrained belief that progress is something that must always occur, being somehow built into the very movement of history.

The Obama administration, deeply corrupted by corporate cronyism, wasn’t about to actually crack down on Wall Street (none of the banksters were jailed; Dodd-Frank was weak medicine compared to the previous Glass-Steagall) and so Obama had to show he was progressing on other fronts. Thus we have the Affordable Care Act. But more importantly, I think, in terms of Obama's progressive cred, we have same-sex marriage, followed by the now raging trans craze--in short, the ascendency of the LGBT movement, to which Obama gave belated but decisive support in an obvious attempt to reenact the Civil Rights Movement in sexual terms. It was liberal myth that made this project plausible. Since “progress” must always be happening, and since we know as a culture what “progress” looks like (namely: previously oppressed groups are given equal rights) this attempt to remake America’s thinking on marriage and gender was rendered passable as an exciting new arena for History, one in which Obama could cement his legacy as a figure comparable to Martin Luther King, Jr. Never mind that the actual Civil Rights Movement sought to undo injustices grounded in specifically modern forms of racism rooted in modern pseudo-scientific theories of race, whereas, quite differently, this new sexual civil rights movement brought with it a concerted ideological assault on much more fundamental human realities: the majority culture's thinking on sexual difference and marriage, both rooted in a traceable history stretching back to ancient times.

The problem, again, was the Obama administration’s insufficient analysis of actual American culture. Millions upon millions of Americans did not in fact agree that redefining marriage in this way was progress. Neither did religious Americans appreciate the heavy-handed way the new definition of marriage was being forced on them. More obviously, relative to Obama policy in the recent couple years, the elevation of a psychological disorder (gender dysphoria) to the status of normal (as if a boy deciding at age six that he is a girl is somehow a previously undiscovered natural development that should lead to immediate name change and eventual hormone treatment) led many Americans to react in justified anger. They saw clearly where this would lead: to a state-baacked LGBT movement dictating to them what boys and girls were, as well as dictating how they were to raise their children. I believe many of these Americans, many who might otherwise have voted Democrat, decided early on to give the whole Obama-Clinton tribe the boot, seeing that this party cabal was pushing into arenas of human meaning where government should not presume to tread. Had it not been for the offenses against religious liberty (again in the name of “progress”) and the rise of the trans craze, Clinton would have likely have won and her party would have held the Senate. Yes, the fury at Obama and the Washington elites over economic issues was certainly crucial, but this cultural blindness of the Democratic leadership might have been the thing to tip many voters into the Trump camp.

Thus again, in the case of Obama, the shattered legacy can be chalked up to a blind indifference to specifically cultural realities: a liberal refusal to look at actual communities and how they hold together; a dogmatic belief in liberal myth, in this case a myth of constant progress, as decisive.

All of this, if my reading is right, should suggest a chastened return to anthropology for anyone who claims to be a political thinker. There is much to cherish in our liberal order, but its mythical excesses, if not recognized, may prove fatal. Liberal consensus is now fraying across the Western world. One of the reasons, in my reading, is precisely this ingrained liberal disrespect for culture. Those who would defend the liberal tradition need to rediscover a respect for the concrete cultures of real nations, and adjust liberal prescriptions accordingly.

Check out my book Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Who are the Yazidi?

Iconic image of Yazidi angel Melek Taus.
Sadly we can now add genocide to the crimes committed by the radical Sunni movement ISIS. The news out of northern Iraq over recent weeks is heartbreaking in almost every respect, but for those who value religious pluralism the evidence that ISIS is doing its best to exterminate Iraq’s Christian and Yazidi communities is especially depressing.

According to most reports, Christian Iraqis are given the choice to convert on the spot to Sunni Islam or die. Either that, or they are killed outright without being given the choice of apostasy. For Yazidis, at least in most reports I have read, no choice is offered. The men are killed and the women and children (those deemed worth using at least) are taken as slaves. Some witnesses who’ve managed to escape speak of groups of Yazidis buried alive; at least one report speaks of a pregnant Yazidi woman having being cut open, her womb and unborn child yanked out of her.

As one Yazidi man put it: “These ISIS fighters cry out ‘God is great’, and then do such things. What kind of human beings are they?”

Indeed. It it were me writing the battle cry for ISIS, it would go: “God is great, but our version of Islam is greater!”

The concept of God, and of how God relates to humanity, has clearly gone haywire in this branch of Sunni Islam. ISIS brings not a return to the Islam of the Prophet Mohammed, but yet another modern utopianism run amok. We can add it to the list: Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Sunni Jihadism.

The crime of genocide against the Yazidi represents a special threat to our human religious inheritance because the Yazidi community is so small. Worldwide there are around 700,000 Yazidis, 93% of which live in the Iraqi province now under ISIS control.

The Yazidi religion is, according to most authorities, a syncretism of elements from Sufism and the Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia. The creation story they subscribe to includes a first human named Adam, as with the other western monotheisms, but the importance they give angels, particularly the angel they call Melek Taus, puts them more in line with Zoroastrianism and even with ancient Gnosticism.

According to the Yazidi, God created the world and then put it under the command of seven angels, emanations from the Godhead, chief of which is Melek Taus, literally “the Peacock Angel”. That the Yazidi symbolize their chief angel with a peacock has led some to assert flippantly that the Yazidi “worship peacocks”--an explanation about as subtle as would be the assertion that Christians worship doves because the Holy Spirit is symbolized by that bird. The story of Melek Taus is a fascinating one; and, one would think, may have led the Yazidi to a uniquely nuanced understanding of authority.

When God created the first human, Adam, he asked the seven angels to bow down before the new creation. One of the seven, Melek Taus, refused.

“How can I bow to another being!” the angel said to God. “I am from your illumination [i.e., a direct emanation from the Godhead] while Adam is made of dust.”

God accepted this argument,and made Melek Taus leader of the other six angels.

The Yazidi, then, conceive of this highest angel as the power that rules directly over the world, their God being more removed, somewhat as in western Deism. What’s more, human good and ill fortune are meted out by Melek Taus according to his wisdom and will, and it is not proper for humans to question their lot. Good and evil are seen as inherent in every human heart, and individuals may choose one or the other. The Yazidi teach that we are to do as Melek Taus did, and choose the true and good.

Of course this is only a very rough sketch, but it gives some idea of the Yazidi belief system, how it is similar to yet different from what is found in the three Abrahamic religions.

Another striking difference is found in the Yazidi belief regarding their ancestral heritage. According to a tale in one of the two collections of Yazidi scripture, they are descended not from Adam and Eve, but from Adam alone. The story is told that a child was born of Adam from his seed stored in a jar, and when this child grew to adulthood he married an houri. The Yazidi are descendants of this “son of Jar” and the houri. It is presumably for this reason that the Yazidi forbid exogamy, i.e., marriage to someone who is not him- or herself a Yazidi. Likewise one cannot convert to Yazidism, as the religion is that of the people born in this lineage from Adam and the houri.

It is the Yazidi’s worship of Melek Taus, and the story of this angel’s refusal to bow to Adam, that has led their Muslim neighbors to characterize them as “worshippers of Satan”. In both the Christian story and in Islam, the angel Lucifer (or, in Islam, Iblis) refused to submit to God through pride, and was cast down from God’s presence--thus our image of Satan as fallen angel. The Yazidi story however is different, as Melek Taus does not refuse through pride, but through respect for the element of God in himself: in other words, through wisdom. In fact the Yazidi consider that the command to bow down to Adam was God’s way of testing the angels, and that Melek Taus is the only one to have passed the test.

Yazidi beliefs are known to outsiders largely through two texts compiled in the early 20th century: the Book of Revelation and the Black Book. These texts, which most scholars agree were not actually written by Yazidis, contain internal contradictions but have been judged to be generally accurate regarding main beliefs and customs.

Since the first appearance of the sect sometime in the Middle Ages, the Yazidi have been persecuted by their Muslim overlords. The current genocide being practiced by ISIS fanatics however poses a special threat to this faith community. Small Yazidi communities exist in Germany, Russia, Georgia, and Armenia, there is a community of several hundred in Lincoln, Nebraska in the US, but the vast majority of Yazidis are now being massacred and enslaved by the barbarians now overrunning northern Iraq.

President Obama’s decision to call for bombing raids in support of the Kurds, Christians and Yazidis against ISIS was overdue. Like many others, I believe our 2003 invasion of Iraq was a grave miscalculation, and that much of the mayhem that has ensued there is a direct result of this initial major blunder. We should not have troops on the ground in Iraq forever, but we should do what we can to beat back the Sunni extremists who are now and always have been our real enemy. The Obama administration shouldn’t have let ISIS get as far as Mosul, much less to within striking reach of the Kurdish capital Erbil.

Eric Mader

FIVE LINKS (and how to help)
1. Check this article at CNN. In the upper left (at least at present) is a link to the full video report from CNN’s Ivan Watson, who accompanied a helicopter supply and rescue operation to Yazidis trapped atop Mt. Sinjar. One of the most striking pieces of video journalism I’ve seen in years.

2. Yazidis in America, thankful for the support they’ve gotten, nonetheless fear their Iraqi community has been left to fall through the cracks of US insistence on a “unified Iraq”. Voice of America reports.

3. Faced with news of what's happening to their family members in Iraq, Yazidis in Nebraska are paralyzed by guilt, reports the LA Times.

4. Son of Yazidi leader calls for British aid.

5. The Catholic organization Caritas: one of the legitimate and reliable ways to help Iraq’s persecuted religious minorities. I would offer more possibilities, but this is the only one I've been able to find that is already up and running in Kurdish territory.

Yazidi man with child in flight from ISIS genocide.

The Ever-Predictable Iraqi Debacle: A Father's Day Rant

WSJ reports on the Shia response.
Father's Day, 2014. I'm with my father in Portland, Oregon, and we just left Powell's Books, the largest used book store on the planet. Somewhat amazingly, we didn't buy anything. Though tempted, my father didn't buy Jared Diamond's recent book (Diamond's first big hit Guns, Germs, and Steel is likely his favorite book of all time; he's mentioned it probably every time I've visited him in recent years); and as for me, I didn't find Jabès Book of Questions or either of the other two books I was looking for. I'm disappointed, yes, but still--You gotta love Powell's.

We step through the drizzle to a Starbuck's across the street. My father sees the crowd inside and suggests we grab one of the outside tables under an awning.

"You want anything?" I ask. "Something without dairy? A soy milk cappuccino?"

"OK, whatever. But I need it sweet."

I go in to order our drinks. At the counter I see a sign: We now serve coconut milk.

"Is that coconut milk with coffee?" I ask.

"Yes. You can have it instead of milk."

"Is it good?"

"It doesn't foam as well as milk, but yeah, I think it's pretty good."

"Alright. One coconut milk single cappuccino and one coconut milk double cappuccino."

On my way out with the drinks, I see the Wall Street Journal by the door with headlines indicating that a major Shiite cleric has called on men to take up arms to defend Iraq's Shia community against the the ISIS insurgents now moving southward.

"You know what pisses me off?" I say to my father, putting down the drinks.

"Portland kids who work at Starbucks?"

"No."

"What?"

"This ongoing fucking mess in Iraq, which has been completely predictable from the start. It pisses me off to no end."

"You mean the uprising they're having now?"

"No, I mean the whole thing from the beginning. We should've left Iraq alone and focused on Afghanistan. This has been the most shameful fiasco in our history. It makes the Vietnam War look like a stroke of genius."

"Yeah. It seems even worse over there now than it was under Saddam. They're all killing each other."

"What's infuriating is that it was all foreseeable. Even before we invaded it was clear toppling Saddam wouldn't result in a stable democracy. Even I--and I'm not by any means an expert on the Muslim world--even I could see it'd only bring chaos. The people that knew the territory, the experts on the region I mean, already in 2002 they were pretty much describing the exact conflict that's now raging. At the time of 9/11, al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq. Now, thanks to our invasion and post-invasion policy, they're all over the place."

"It was mismanaged, and the whole thing wasn't about al Qaeda anyway," my father says. "It was all just for oil. Even Greenspan, a lifelong Republican heavyweight, came out and admitted it."

"And did we get our oil? No. We got fucking nothing. We took out Saddam and the inevitable civil war broke out. On our penny."

"We've spent a trillion dollars there," he says. "Probably mostly wasted."

"Absolutely wasted. Iraq is divided between three ethnic groups that hate each other: the Shia in the south, the largest by population; the Sunni in the middle; and the Kurds in the north. They hate each other. Probably the only thing they have in common, except for maybe the Kurds, is that they hate us even more than they hate each other. Fertile ground for Western-style democracy, hey? And for us to be the ones who try to set it up. It's a pipe dream."

"And Syria's right next to Iraq, and there's war there too now. Is that also Sunni versus Shia?"

"Basically yes."

"So it's the same mess in two neighboring countries. Why don't these people ever stop killing each other?"

"Well, Christians have a long history of sectarian wars too. Look at Europe after the Reformation. It was brutal. And it continued until recent times. The Muslim world just still happens to be of a mindset that the West has more or less grown out of."

"So you don't think it's because Muslims are more warlike than Christians?"

"I think there's definitely something to that claim, sure. The Koran is full of calls to take up arms for Islam. If one group of Muslims sees a different group of Muslims corrupting what they see as the truth, they must take up arms to defend 'true Islam' from the corrupting influence of heretics. Thus the Sunni have little patience for Shia, and vice-versa."

"And you think Iraq avoided civil war in the past only because of Saddam's iron fist keeping the conflict down, is that what you're saying?"

"Saddam was a brutal dictator whose regime committed horrible atrocities. Don't get me wrong, as if I'm saying anything good about Saddam. What I am saying is that it was naive of our leaders to assume Iraq would stay in one piece after he was gone. That you could go and just have elections and everything would work out. It was nonsense. The line the Bush administration was pushing--Everybody wants freedom; we'll be welcomed with open arms; it'll be a cakewalk--it was all utter bullshit. Everybody wants freedom? Yeah, right. The Shia want freedom to get revenge for being crushed for decades under Saddam's Sunni thugs. The Sunni, for their part, want freedom to ensure the Shia never get the upper hand in government. Because they know they Shia will get revenge. So, sure, everybody wants freedom there, no shit, and for just that reason, Mr. Rumsfeld, it will NOT be a cakewalk."

"Gotcha."

"And lo and behold, as soon as Saddam was out, a low intensity civil war began, day fucking one. And once the American troops were out, the civil war could quickly shift into a more high-intensity mode, which again is just what has happened. And what pisses me off is that all this was obvious before we even went in. It was clear as day that we were only kicking a hornets' nest."

"We should have probably sent in a larger invading force," he says, turning back.

"I think it wouldn't have made much difference. Iraq's a powder keg, and it isn't our responsibility to keep a lid on it. Look what it has cost us. Let the Iraqis manage their own differences."

"By killing each other."

"Look, in a very real sense there's no such thing as Iraqis anyway. It's a fake country. The borders were set up by the British in the 1920s, and they intentionally kept these ethnic groups together under one government. It's an old imperialist trick. It's easier to control a state made up populations that don't get along. They're less likely to come together and organize resistance that way. Iraq has been a fake country from the start, designed to fall into civil war if the government were ever overthrown."

"That's pretty well put--the fake country part. You should write it down. A lot of people don't know anything about it."

"Pssh! People have been writing it down since before we even went in, better writers than me, but what difference did it make? Nobody pays attention to intelleckchuls when America wants to go to war. No, it's all anger about 9/11, Colin Powell, Dick Fucking Cheney--that's what people will listen to. After the Twin Towers went down, we Americans--who have enormous resources for understanding the world but really hardly know shit about it--we just got this idea into our heads that we had to go kill us some Muslims. And voila, there was Bush and Co., more than willing to point to Iraq. It had what Cheney called 'worthwhile targets'."

"Oil."

"And Dubya and his inner circle didn't know anything about Iraq and didn't try to learn anything either. When the State Department presented them with 4,000 pages of detailed contingency plans should the US decide to go in, plans written by the people in our government who had expertise on the region and the cultures involved--what did the Bush team do? They refused even to read the plans! Nope. Everything's gonna be alright. Shock and awe 'n all. We're goin' in. It's all documented. They refused even to look at them. They'd somehow gotten it into their heads that once Saddam was taken out, Disney World would forthwith erupt in the Middle East. It was absurd. I'm thinking Paul Wolfowitz deserves blame for a lot of it. In any case, we were drawn into a war that lasted a decade, got 4,400 Americans killed, cost us a trillion of dollars, and offered us nothing in return. It's criminal ineptitude at the highest level of government. And now the Fox crowd is trying to blame Obama that Iraq is still in chaos! Which is ridiculous for the simple reason that there is no fucking way Iraq wouldn't be in chaos. Because the so-called country Iraq is basically a recipe for chaos. Add three parts Shia, two parts Sunni, one part Kurd. Stir in massive oil revenue. Bring to simmer, then remove lid. Watch mixture explode in your face."

My father is laughing.

"But the current civil war only started because Obama withdrew our troops too soon, no?" he says. He's trying to provoke me.

"Withdrew them too soon? That's a funny one. This Iraq mess has already gone on longer than World War II! Think about it. And what can be done given the facts on the ground? Leave our troops there forever? The shit is going to hit the fan sooner or later, and the longer we stay there, every American life lost is another life wasted just kicking the can down the road. I'd say we should do our best from the outside. Dubya decided to take out Saddam, now we're stuck in the middle--between brutal Sunni militias on the one hand and Iran-backed Shia on the other. And when I said earlier I was pissed, and though I've gone on for half an hour about it, the truth is I haven't even gotten to the thing that pisses me off the most."

"What's that?"

"It's this ISIS uprising, and how it reveals what hypocrites our leaders are when it comes to dealing with al Qaeda. ISIS is basically another flavor of al Qaeda, the group basically morphed out of a Qaeda in Iraq, the Syrian opposition and other linked groups. And what pisses me off is that John McCain, erstwhile American war hero become loudmouth ass-clown, last year made a surprise visit to Syria to meet with some of the fighters in that Syrian opposition, because, you know, we also don't like the Syrian government."

"And?"

"And McCain's argument, critical of Obama policy, was that we should be arming and funding these Syrian 'freedom fighters'. My own attitude was that we should stay out of it, but McCain, you know, never tires of trying to push us into new military conflicts. The man never saw a war he didn't like. I shudder to think what would have happened had he become president."

"I voted for him," my father says.

"Well, then maybe you'd have liked what you got. In his first term he opens three new US fronts in Arab countries, then the pressures of office and the chorus of boos from Americans who think we've messed around enough in the Middle East starts to get to him, he suffers a heart attack, and Palin is the new American president. Your son, the day after she's inaugurated, fulfills a barroom promise and burns his passport."

"Hah hah. Anyhow, even if that moron Palin did become president, she'd just be a puppet of the people really calling the shots."

"To some degree yes, but the fact is that the president gets to choose who he or she listens to. Look at Bush. And I'd hate to see Palin's lineup of policy advisors. A few Duck Dynasty faces, Rush, her Wasilla high school math teacher as Federal Reserve Chairman. . . ."

"You think McCain's an idiot because he doesn't know how to use the Internet."

"Absolutely not. I think he's an idiot because some of that same bunch of fighters he posed with just last year, that Syrian opposition, is now part of ISIS. In other words, your party's candidate for president was basically suggesting we arm al Qaeda. It's despicable. Back in the Reagan years we had the excuse that we didn't quite know what the Taliban were capable of. In those days bin Laden was helping us fight the Soviets. But now we've got no excuse. We know very well who these people are and what their long-term goals are. But here's your party's main man smiling and shaking hands and saying we should actually start to arm them again!"

"What do they say about the enemy of your enemy being your friend? Sometimes politics is like that."

"Sure. But I think there's a limit. And in the Muslim world we frequently cross that limit. And we get burned in the end. And in any case the people with power to make policy should at least know something about what they're advocating for. Bush obviously didn't. McCain has the same kind of cowboy recklessness. There's plenty I don't like about the Obama administration, a helluva lot, but at least his people aren't full-out psychos."

"Let's get out of here," my father says. "It's getting cold. And enough politics. Talking about stocks is more interesting."

I make a yawning gesture.

"You know politics, I know investment. Politics don't interest me. From now on we talk PE, shorting, bonds. I'll explain shorting to you again."

"How was the cappuccino?"

"Nothing special. Should have been sweeter."

"Alright, let's hit the road."

Eric Mader

My father and I near Bend, Oregon.

Bush Sells Plan for Iraq, Cites Bird Omens (from: The Disassociated Press Archive)

A Disassociated Press Report, May 27, 2004

US President George W. Bush tried to convince Americans on Monday the war in Iraq could be turned around as the US and Britain asked the UN for a resolution endorsing the handover of power to an interim Iraqi government.

In a half-hour televised speech at the US Army War College, Bush insisted the deteriorating situation was not a reason for despair.

"It's true we don't have a plan," said Bush. "But you can be sure of one thing: we will stay the course."

Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, suggesting he faces the possibility of defeat in the Nov. 2 election. This speech was considered an important opportunity to persuade voters that the war in Iraq had not gone irretrievably wrong. Bush, however, did not take that opportunity.

"There are difficult days ahead," he said. "The way forward may sometimes appear chaotic. In fact it will almost certainly be chaotic because we don't have a plan and we have steadfastly refused to take advice. Even so we're hoping to hold this puppy together until the elections at least, and maybe beyond. And we have reason to believe that ultimately triumph will be ours."

Bush explained that his reason for confidence was a bird omen he witnessed while at his ranch in Texas.

"I saw an eagle clutching a serpent in its talons," he said. "It is a sign that God is on our side and the enemy is cursed. A great victory lies ahead for us."

This is the first time in a speech that Bush has evoked bird omens as relevant to the war on terror. Although widely known for his strong religious beliefs, the president's mention of omens has surprised some commentators, who note that bird omens in particular are associated with pagan Greece and Rome rather than Christianity.

"We are not really happy with this recourse to pagan practice," said Farley Shagmitt, current chairman of the Southern Evangelical Reformed SS League. "But the president is a man who loves the great outdoors, and if he finds inspiration in an American eagle, then maybe it isn't so un-Christian after all. God created eagles too."

Other commentators noted Bush's mention of the bird omen was oddly similar to a scene in the recently released blockbuster film Troy, starring Brad Pitt. In that film, based on Homer's war poem the Iliad, a Trojan priest at one point refers to an omen of an eagle clutching a serpent as a sign that Troy will win a "great victory."

"I think the president saw the movie and wanted to link his war on terror with the great ancient war between Greeks and Trojans," said Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). "Unfortunately, what the president failed to note was that finally the Trojans didn't win the war. Instead their city was destroyed by the invading Greeks. Thus this allusion to the movie is misguided: it's confusing and counterproductive, now at a time when we need clarity and direction from our leader."

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) agreed. "If the president wanted to allude to the Trojan war," she said, "he at least could have put America on the winning side."

During his speech Bush also referred to the prisoner abuse scandal, three times mentioning the Abu Ghraib prison where the scandal first came to light. Each of the three times Bush used the name, however, he mangled it. The first time he called the prison "Abugah Rape," the second time "Abu Garon," and the third time "Abu Garah."

"These bizarre mispronunciations do not necessarily suggest brain damage," Dr. David Wenford of the Harvard School of Psychiatric Medicine said in a telephone interview. "Such stammering over a particular word might also mean the person speaking is hiding something as regards the subject being discussed."

Wenford explained that such mispronunciations often indicate a "fixation" on the word in question, and that such fixations can develop from a feeling of shame or guilt over some hidden truth.

"Given the president's extremely dysfunctional performance on the prison name, I would suggest there may be more gruesome things coming to light in terms of abuse of prisoners."

Jim Morrison Captured in Iraq

A Disassociated Press Report, Baghdad, December 15, 2003

By Eric Mader

Jim Morrison two years before his "death" in Paris.

In what is likely to go down as one of the most embarrassing mishaps of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, American forces last night captured the former Doors singer Jim Morrison in a farmhouse just south Tikrit.

Initially pinpointed by American intelligence as one of the hideouts of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the farmhouse was stormed by a force of sixty armed U.S. soldiers, who pulled a confused Morrison from an eight-foot deep pit where, it was later learned, the former rock singer would normally go "to meditate."

Believing they had captured Saddam Hussein, U.S. forces conducted a medical examination and later called a press conference during which they showed videos to prove they had captured the former Iraqi leader.

Standing up and waving their arms furiously during the initial airing of the videos, a number of Iraqi journalists present at the press conference began yelling: "That's not Saddam, you idiots! That's Jim Morrison!"

Simultaneous voice translations given by CNN, however, first reported the angry journalists' words as: "Saddam! Saddam! You deserve to die! Saddam!"

More than nine hours had passed after the initial capture before the case of mistaken identity was realized.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, tried to make light of the mishap by recalling his initial words of elation: "Well, ladies and gentleman, we still got 'im! It's just a different him."

Jim Morrison, who was previously believed to have died in his bathtub in Paris in 1971, told reporters early today that he had faked his death in order to escape from his life of drug abuse and rock stardom. Morrison has apparently been living in Iraq since the early seventies, when he converted to Islam.

The two men captured with Morrison were indeed "loyalists," although not of the sort sought by American forces. Part of an underground Sufi poetry group that Morrison founded, the men claimed to journalists to have remained almost constantly in "the Master's" presence since the late 1980s.

"We are not merely seeking to cleanse the doors of perception," Morrison told reporters in explanation of the goals of his group. "We are out to unhinge them, you know? We seek total illumination."

Jim Morrison examined by a U.S. army doctor after his capture in Iraq.