Brain removal

Karl Rove, referred to by critics of the US administration as "Bush's Brain", has decided to stop prancing for the president. The guru's resignation was announced soon after the Bush family picnic at Kennebunkport attended by a French vacationer named Nicolas Sarkozy (whose wife Cécilia didn't turn up, because she had a cold).

I've been wondering whether there might be some kind of causal relationship between these happenings. Maybe the Brain concluded that, if the wife of a foreign head of state can find a polite way of saying no to Dubya, then it was time for him to behave similarly. There are other conjectures. It's possible that the Brain was shocked to see his protégé behaving in a cool friendly fashion towards a Frenchman. Or maybe the vision of a French president saying he likes America was simply too much, convincing Karl Rove that he no longer understands anything whatsoever about politics.

In any case, the Brain's neurons have been been flickering alarmingly ever since 2003, when he earned notoriety by leaking the name of ex-CIA spy Valerie Plame. Sure, you might say that mere notoriety is better than a spell in jail, but it must have been a minor cerebral trauma for Rove to see his colleague Scooter Libby condemned in place of Dick Cheney and himself. More recently, there has been another nasty affair about Rove's involvement in the firing of federal judges who weren't sufficiently loyal to Dubya. And the backdrop to this fall from grace is of course the recent Republican electoral defeat.

The sole pertinent question is: Can George W Bush, deprived of his Brain, pursue his presidential mandate? What a silly question! Of course he can. Like weightlessness for seasoned astronauts, brainlessness is a state that Dubya knows well. The US president is an experienced idiot.

Business as usual

There's an everyday expression in French, fond de commerce, whose literal meaning is "business assets". But it's often used in the case of small shopkeepers to designate the particular commercial setting and customers that enable them to earn their living. For example, I recall the prolific and popular French novelist Frédéric Dard [1921-2000] talking about his childhood on a radio program. At one stage, his mother had a small shop that sold merchandise designated in French as farces-attrapes, which means trivial objects used for practical jokes, tricks and party gags. [I'm not sure I ever saw such a shop back in Australia... or anywhere outside of France, for that matter.] Well, Frédéric Dard explained with glee that his mother's commercial operations meant, for example, that she had to stock an assortment of the finest imitation dog turds made out of rubber. In other words, her fond de commerce included these objects and, by the same token, the people who buy such stuff. She therefore had to maintain constant contacts with the wholesalers who produced these objects. So, whenever a manufacturer's representative called in at her shop, she would ask to be brought up to date: "Please show me a few samples of this year's creations in the field of dog shit."

In a totally different domain, I've always felt that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani is like a small shopkeeper whose constant business preoccupation is terrorism.

As a consequence of September 11, 2001, Rudy nows knows more about how to deal with terrorists than anyone else in the world... including Bill Clinton, of course, and maybe even George W Bush. Rudy is a specialist in terrorist threats just like the mother of Frédéric Dard was a specialist in imitation dog turds. It's Giuliani's business, and nobody should dare to tell him how to run his business, particularly if they're Democrats. Above all, Rudy doesn't want to listen to anybody talking about bringing the troops home from Iraq.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee made it clear, tersely, that Rudy's establishment is not at all the best little shop in town: "Rudy's arrogance has gotten the best of him. How can a man who failed to prepare New York City for a second attack after the first one, who sent firefighters and emergency workers into Ground Zero without respirators and quit the Iraq Study Group to raise money keep America safe?"

Will those negative remarks slow down Rudy's operations? Not at all. Business as usual.

US presidential campaign

Click the banner to hear Hillary Clinton's campaign song: You and I by Celine Dion. It's funny, Celine's voice in this song reminds me of the intonation of another singer I adore: Shania Twain. Or am I imagining things?

No future

In a post of 17 January 2007 entitled Therapy, I mentioned my enthusiasm for the blog of Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip. [Click here to see this post.] Lately he has set aside his usual facetious and offbeat topics, as well as his curious naive crusade against the concept of free will, and he has got around to some serious soul-searching about the role of the US in today's world. He has been trying to invent serious and less serious schemes for the US to get out of Iraq, to win back respect and friendship from other nations, and to cease being regarded as a prime target for terrorists. He has even taken a sudden interest in the threat of global warming.

In the piles of comments that Scott's blog attracts, I've often found allusions to the much-celebrated role of the US in putting an end to the Hitlerian catastrophe in the Old World. A bewildered American asked rhetorically the other day (I'm paraphrasing his comment): "If the US could do such a good job in eliminating Nazism, why have we got everything screwed up in Iraq?" I would hope that the fellow who made this comment recalls that Iraq is not the first US military fiasco. There was Vietnam...

This evening, on the Franco-German TV channel called Arte, a series of excellent documentaries tackled the subject of the current image of the US as seen through European eyes. A theme that reoccurs constantly is the notion that the USA felt comfortable on the world scene as long as it had a precise enemy to combat, such as the Soviet Union. But Bush's alleged "war against terror" was a nonsense thing, because there was no longer any explicit enemy to wage war against. And the US is lost in this new world, like Don Quixote setting out on his steed to fight windmills. Another reoccurring theme is that we Europeans might happen to have ringside seats for the imminent fall of a latter-day empire akin to that of Ancient Rome. It's astounding to observe the way in which many serious European observers tend to talk calmly but solemnly about the USA as if its power, global glory and influence were things of the past. In two words: no future.