It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Does Bush learn from his mistakes? In his first debate with John Kerry on September 30 2004, George W. Bush refused to correct his error from earlier in the week, when he erroneously asserted that 100,000 Iraqi soldiers, police and security officers had been trained. As a number of media outlets reported, the actual number is only 22,700. Instead of acknowledging his error, he repeated it:

"Let me first tell you that the best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. And that‘s what we‘re doing. We‘ve got 100,000 trained now."

It was wrong when he said it earlier in that week, and it was wrong when he said it in the debate. We need a president who learns from his mistakes. George W. Bush doesn't even seem to recognize them.

Lest you think Mr. Bush simply misspoke, minutes later he repeated the claim:

"There are 100,000 troops trained, police, guard, special units, border patrol. "

Bush didn't merely slip up: it appears he wrote a glaring factual error, off by an entire order of magnitude, into his talking points. Well, either he wrote it or his handlers wrote it. Which is the worse possibility: that he knowingly rattled off and repeated facts he knew weren't true (they call that a "lie" where I come from), or that he rattled off talking points that he knew nothing about the veracity of, prepared by a handler who knew they weren't true? Neither possibility is heartening.

(Source: Transcript of John Kerry / George W. Bush Debate of September 30, 2004)


Posted by James Cook at 9:11 AM. # (permalink)




Return to the Irregular Times Main Page

Read our Blog Archives