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AN OPEN LETTER TO G. W. BUSH
BY PETER KURTH (published 04.19.06)
“I am a victim of terrorism!
I have intelligence information for the president! I’m not afraid of you!”
– Brian Lee Patterson, 40, after scaling the White House fence on
April 9, “looking distraught” and “screaming
incoherently.”
“Patterson apparently has made a habit of crashing the
president's house. According to the Secret Service, this is the fourth time
the Albuquerque native has been arrested for unlawfully
entering the White House grounds.” – Elites-TV News Service
TO: George W. Bush
FROM: Peter Kurth
SUBJECT: “Your” House
Dear George:
I’m writing you
directly because nothing else seems to work. I mean, we can’t all take Mr.
Patterson’s approach by jumping the gates of the White House in an
effort to get your attention.
I’m not a Republican, not in the military, and not a
fundamentalist Christian, so I don’t stand a chance of being invited
to one of your pre-screened question-and-answer sessions and talking to you
that way. And we know that Cindy
Sheehan’s tactic also failed – that is, camping out in Crawford
and demanding an audience with the Great Panjandrum. All it did was make Ms. Sheehan famous
and give her a platform – a much larger platform than she’d
have had, George, if you’d only taken a few minutes off from
bike-riding, brush-clearing and barbecues and pretended to listen to what
she said.
So, a letter it is. I tried this a month ago with your
Homeland Security director, Michael Chertoff, but I never had a reply. Probably Mr. Chertoff is too busy
figuring out how to keep Mr. Patterson off your lawn, but I know you have
more time on your hands than Chertoff does, what with the bike-riding,
brush-clearing, etc., so I’m hoping that you or someone you know (at
the NSA maybe?) actually reads your mail.
Of course, this is an
“open” letter, George, which means a lot of people will read it
even if you don’t. But, as you
said so smartly while refusing to provide Congress with documentation of
the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, "That's just the way it
works."
Anyway, George, you’ll
have to forgive me for not addressing you as “Mr.
President.” I’d like to
honor your office, at least, but in your case I’m not allowed. I mean that literally: My mother won’t let me, and
there’d be hell to pay if I went against her wishes.
You know how mothers are,
George – you’ve got one of your own. Yours is the one who wears pearls and
once called you “a dirty dog” on the “Today”
show. Mine is the one who lets out a
little shriek – OK, a big shriek – whenever she sees you on TV,
and especially when anyone refers to you as “the president,”
“this president,” or “Mr. President.” My mother’s lived under 14
presidents, George, and I’m afraid she thinks you’re a punk. No amount of arguing is going to change
her mind.
“It’s that wave,” she says. “You know – whenever he gets
off a plane and struts around, he waves as if he were a five-year-old boy
going off to his first day in kindergarten.
He waves as if he’s saying, `Wook, Mommy! I’m de
Commandew-in-Cheef!’ Somebody
needs to give that man waving lessons.”
My mother was especially
upset, George – well, we all were – about your response last
week to mounting calls from ex-military men that you fire your Secretary of
War, Donald Rumsfeld. (Please
don’t insult us by calling him your Secretary of
“Defense.”) You said that
Rumsfeld has your “full support and deepest appreciation,”
despite the slaughter and devastation that he, and you, have wrought in
your illegal, immoral and fruitless war in Iraq, and despite the fact that
Rumsfeld has now been connected directly to your policy of torture, abuse
and degradation of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other
“extraordinary rendition spots” around the globe.
"Secretary Rumsfeld's
energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical
period," you declared on Friday.
Then you, or someone, threw a lot of still-serving military honchos
onto the Sunday talk shows to say that calls for Rumsfeld’s
resignation are “inappropriate in time of war.”
“Inappropriate?”
my mother cried. “Inappropriate? Tens of thousands of innocent people
dead, no end in sight to this phony war, the Pentagon now planning nuclear
strikes on Iran – and we’re told that even talking about tossing these bums out on their ears is
`inappropriate’! Point of
order!”
I won’t tell you what
my mother said after that, George, because it isn’t pretty. But I dare you – I dare you – to haul your sorry
ass to Iraq
for more than a photo-op and ask any mother there, any one at all, exactly
how “inappropriate” it would be to put an end to your
incompetent, criminal regime, and, for that matter, to you. I mean your presidency, of course,
George, not “you” as a person.
But that’s only because, unlike you, I’m not a murderer,
and I don’t want to end up at Guantánamo myself.
Meantime, George, I think you
need more than just lessons in waving.
I think you need lessons in politics, diplomacy, statecraft and
human decency. I think you need a
crash course in history. I think you
need remedial reading and a whole new set of friends. I think your own mother ought to give you
a good hiding, Texas-style, and I hope to hell we’ll see the last of
you, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and the rest of your lying cabal before the
world goes up in flames. Capisce?
My best to Laura and the
twins.
Peter Kurth
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