March 14, 2006
Trotting Out The Twerp
[For background, readers should consult Catherine King's Open Letter to the President of the USA, with which I totally concur.]
by Jerome du Bois
The same day I started reading Oriana Fallaci's The Force Of Reason --a righteous response to Islamic lies and social aggression-- I came upon the story embodied by the image below, which we captured for our Pink series:
Absurd arrogance fosters outrage. Who the fuck is this twit to speak one word on foreign policy, just because he's a Bush? I voted for the President and I have supported him, but he's been dropping the jug over and over; and for the Bush family to trot this twerp out is the worst form of monarchical haughtiness. (The nephew says he is "unsure" if his uncle knew about his letter to the editor. Do you believe that? I don't. Why? His father is Neil Bush, a philanderer with the morals of a five-sided comedian. I think this apple of his father's eye fell directly under the tree. And Neil Bush's educational software company Ignite Learning depends on millions of dollars in UAE financing.)
Pierce Bush's appearance on national TV to defend the now-defunct dubious Dubai deal is like a tiny replica of the Dubai deal itself, in that it clearly demonstrates this family's insulting imperial attitude toward average Americans, and its arrogant obtuseness in the face of our righteous and well-founded outrage.
These pseudo-bluebloods make a grave mistake when they go against the American grain, which bristles whenever it catches any hint of royalty or blood privilege. That's what our ancestors left behind. That's why they left: so that no kings, no queens, no priests would rule over us. Didn't you read the Constitution at the Kinkaid Skool, Pierce?
This smirky white-bread prep-school wimp has the gall to say that
opposition to the deal — it had been approved by the administration before being scuttled Thursday — sent an "ignorant and offensive" message that the owners were being discriminated against because they are Arab. The protests of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other congressional leaders seemed "racially prejudiced," he said in the letter, which the Chronicle published.
What a pimp. Talk about ignorant and offensive. Did you learn a lot of this horse manure while being dandled on Bandar's knee, little man? Did you get the message every time Uncle Bandy pressed a hundred-dollar bill into your soft grasping paw?
First fact: on the day that Pierce Bush, who has been to Dubai, sent his email to the Houston newspaper, the UAE's foreign policy included material and financial support for Hamas. It still does today. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out on NRO Friday, this is a direct violation of the Bush Doctrine:
The UAE was with the terrorists, big-time, before 9/11. The port-deal proponents —finding it most inconvenient to dwell on that very recent history— ignored it, preferring to libel patriotic opposition as benighted nativism, or to insist that the suicide hijackings against us were a road-to-Damascus moment for the Emirati sheikhs. It was the epiphany that put them on the right side of the Bush Doctrine’s line in the sand.
Oops. It looks like the UAE continued to underwrite terrorists long after that. Even to this day. The regime remains a booster of Hamas, an organization pledged to the destruction of Israel by violent jihad. An organization that has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization under American law since we began officially stigmatizing such entities in the mid-1990s.
It's not because they're Arabs; it's because they're evil, and they support evil regimes and doctrines. Pierce Bush is willing to sign off on that, on the Today Show.
And they're racist as hell over there. In fact, most of the UAE is run like a plantation.
On November 23, 2003, I published a piece called The Shameful Sham of the Sixth Sharjah "International" Art Biennial. Sharjah is one of the Emirates. The post included this quote from Freedom House:
Foreign nationals, who make up a staggering 98 percent of the private workforce, are subject to abuse and nonpayment of wages by employers. While labor law offers some protection, most abuse goes unreported. In June 2002, the UAE press reported that an Asian worker died and 15 fell ill at a labor camp , where workers lived in sweltering heat without water or electricity for several days because their Dubai-based employer had not paid the utility bills. In September, the government criminalized the hiring of camel jockeys under the age of 15.
Staggering is right. Outrageous. Most of the population waits on the top two percent of Arab natives. And sometimes these rich lazy fuckheads --some of whom Pierce Bush probably hung out with when he flew over there with Daddy-- won't even pay their indentured servants. Last fall, from the International Herald Tribune:
When 800 distraught workers began a protest march down a main highway here last week, they set off a national debate about the treatment of the foreign workers who are turning this Gulf emirate from desert dunes into a modern metropolis.
The men were among 6,000 foreign laborers, most of them Indians and Pakistanis, who live in a desert work camp several miles outside of the city. All 6,000 had languished without pay for more than five months.
The protest was by no means the first of its kind here, but it was unprecedented in its scale and visibility, and it served to lay bare a Dickensian underworld of poverty and exploitation in the shadow of a gleaming city of high-rise buildings and luxury hotels. . . .
How long do you think an American company could get away with that kind of dehumanizing behavior?
. . . The United Arab Emirates has earned the dubious distinction of having some of the worst labor conditions in the world. Human Rights Watch has cited the country for discrimination, exploitation and abuse. Many foreign workers, especially women, face intimidation and violence, including sexual assault, at the hands of employers, supervisors, and police and security forces, the rights group said.
I am describing Pierce and Neil's buddies over there. Igniting learning like a sonofabitch, I bet, huh? Did you hear the soft voices of the darkies in the evening, little man, while you were schmoozing with their Arab masters?
And then the punk puts on the preppy red, white, and blue, polishes his smarmy smirk, and defends these backward, tribal, racist, greedy, anti-Semitic terrorist sympathizers.
And he thinks that the newspaper readers and the TV viewers are as stupid and shallow and lazy as he is, and won't fact-check his ass six ways from Sunday. That they'll take his word for it. Trust him. Him! The mayor of Twit City!
The Dubai deal debacle shows that our leaders have woefully underestimated the alert intelligence of the average American, millions of whom, like me, knew the thing stank as soon as they read the first sentence on the crawl, or saw the headline. It was as clear as the moment that Rudy Giuliani told the Saudi prince he could keep his blood money.
I don't see you doing anything like that, Pierce. Now let the grown-ups get back to work. Go spend Daddy's money, some of which was purchased at the expense of the stunted lives of Pakistani slaves.
Posted by Jerome at March 14, 2006 09:00 AM | TrackBack