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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (153770)	6/16/2001 11:55:57 AM
From: asenna1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

"The United States' decision to abandon the Kyoto agreement and put its own energy requirements above the planet's health has supplied Europe with an unusually rapid means of deciding the worth of George Bush - if indeed we needed one. At any rate, in little less than a week Europeans have concluded that the US government has been captured by an exceptionally irresponsible and foolish man. Bush seems too bad to be true. While we all blinked at his dismissal of Kyoto and the forging ahead with plans for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Bush attended a dinner in Washington where he sought to relax the White House press corps with a line about water purity. "As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water," he said. "To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating." What we appear to have in the White House, then, is the American equivalent of Jim Davidson: an unabashed conservative with a historic drink problem and an alluringly toxic sense of humour. But not even Jim would have confused capital punishment with death duties as Bush did a few weeks ago when he declared: "We understand how unfair the death penalty is." We in Europe gape at such faux pas and conclude - unjustly, as it happens - that George Bush is some kind of essential distillation of all US culture and that, therefore, all America is to blame for his presence in the White House. We note that the US constitutes 5% of the world's population but is responsible for a quarter of all mankind's emissions of carbon dioxide. With only the slightest hesitation, it seems, this same nation voted in Bush Mark II, who promised to out-Reagan Reagan and to dismiss world opinion on issues which, in our innocence, we had decided were pretty much orthodoxies for the new century. And then something fascinating happened, something which had long been waiting to happen. All the resentments about American national life - the continued use of the death penalty, the refusal to address guns, the overbearing nature of its entertainment industry, the disinclination to wholeheartedly ratify treaties on landmines, and the International Criminal Court - coalesced into a single charge sheet which damned American society as being arrogant and out of touch with global concerns" guardian.co.uk