If you haven't seen it elsewhere, here's the full, unedited version of President Bush's piss-take of hhimself at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

The annual WHC dinner is an amazing experience - a mix of everyone who is anyone inside the Beltway, Hollywood and TV stars and pretty much everyone else who has a national profile in the US. I was at the now infamous WHC dinner a few years ago when Don Imus went for President Clinton. I'm still recovering...

PS Stephen Colbert's brilliant speech is here. It's a terrific send up of the Right:

I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible -- I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical. And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be it Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe our infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Watch the whole thing.

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If you want an indication of how bad things now are for President Bush - which I saw for myself in DC last week - have a read of this, which was sent to me by a life-long Republican activist:

WHERE DO YOU STAND MORALLY?

This test only has one question, but it's a very important one.
By giving an honest answer, you will discover where you stand morally.

The test features an unlikely, completely fictional situation in which you will have to make a decision.

Remember that your answer needs to be honest, yet spontaneous. Please scroll down slowly and give due consideration to each line.

-------------
THE SITUATION
-------------

You are in New Orleans. There is chaos all around you caused by a hurricane with severe flooding. This is a flood of biblical proportions. You are a photo journalist working for a major newspaper, and you're caught in the middle of this epic disaster.

The situation is nearly hopeless. You're trying to shoot career- making photos. There are houses and people swirling around you, some disappearing under the water. Nature is unleashing all of its destructive fury.

--------
THE TEST
--------

Suddenly you see a man in the water. He is fighting for his life, trying not to be taken down with the debris. You move closer.

Somehow the man looks familiar. You suddenly realize who it is. It's the President, George W. Bush. At the same time you notice that the raging waters are about to take him under forever.

You have two options - you can save the life of the President, or you can shoot a dramatic Pulitzer Prize winning photo, documenting the death of one of the world's most famous men.

------------
THE QUESTION
------------

Here's the question, and please give an honest answer.......

Would you select high contrast color film, or would you go with the classic simplicity of black and white?

Andrew Sullivan has an insightful posting on Hayek and Katrina:

One of the more irritating aspects of the post-Katrina debate has been the assertion by some liberals that the failure to provide emergency assistance for citizens hit by a natural diasaster is a function of conservatism. The notion is that conservatives hate government so much that they do not even think the government has an obligation to act in a natural disaster. In fact, the opposite is true. Real conservatives (I'm not referring to the crew now in the White House) favor energetic executive action where only it can do the job: police, war, disaster relief, a basic social welfare net. What we're against is social engineering, redistributive taxation, over-regulation of private activity, etc. What conservatives want is a smaller yet stronger government. And getting smaller helps government focus on what it really should do, not on all the illusory goals that some liberals believe in, like, er, ending human inequality.

He goes on to quote Hayek:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance...the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.... To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state's rendering assistance to the victims of such "acts of God" as earthquakes and floods. Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.

Q: What is George W. Bush's position on Roe vs. Wade?

A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

President Bush lends a hand in New Orleans

UPDATE: Blimey, do I really have to spell this out? For those of you have emailed me outraged that I have not cited a source for this picture...It's not real. It's a JOKE.

I'm sorry for the lack of posts of late. I'm preoccupied with something at the moment, and it's limiting my time to post. Fear not, normal service will resume any moment now.

I should however say that those of you who have written to ask why I haven't posted about Katrina are right to point out that it's an odd ommission, but the explanation is not, as some have suggested, that I am simply ignoring it because it somehow negates my views about President Bush's foreign policy.

It's simply that I haven't anything to add that is more than banal. And I certainly have little to add to Andrew Sullivan (especially this post).

I have no hesitation in writing that President Bush's behaviour in this regard is indefensible on every level. It's also, from a purely self-serving political position, astonishingly inept. It is beyond my comprehension how he and his staff took so long to comprehend the magnitude of what happened. That of course pales into insignificance beside the more basic and important failure - to use his office to make sure that the right things were done.

But I fail to see how, as some people have suggested to me, the fact that his performance in this instance has been so lamentable somehow demonstrates that his foreign policy is wrong and that I should recant my support for the war, or for the idea of a liberal interventionist foreign policy. That is a total non-sequitur; the two are no more linked than the fact that England are about to retain the Ashes shows that Andrew Flintoff should manage the England football team.

More soon...

President Bush has arrived in Brussels to a be greeted by a charming sticker campaign by the youth branch of the Flemish Socialist Party (SPA), one of Belgium's (four) governing parties.

They're not just any ordinary stickers. They've been specially made to be placed in urinals so that, as the press release puts it, Belgians can "make a statement and show in a playful manner that we do no like the policies of the American president and his visit to our country."

Charmed, I'm sure.

UPDATE:
A Belgian friend has sent me the following email:

The stickers have been created by Mr Laurent Winnock, president of the Young Socialists, the official youth branch of the Socialist Party. The stickers can be ordered through the official website of the governing Socialist Party.

Mr. Winnock works in the office of Johan Vande Lanotte, Belgium's Vice Prime Minister and Minister of the Budget, as well as Minister of the North Sea. He is one of Vande Lanotte's press spokesmen.

Vande Lanotte will shake hands with Bush today, during the meeting of Bush with the Belgian government. I wonder whether he has had a pee on Bush's face in the toilets of his ministerial offices first?

But this is Belgium: the country of Manneken Pis.

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I should have been in DC earlier this week for a series of briefings and meetings with members of the Bush administration. Various work activities meant I couldn't go.

I suppose there may be a certain chic in being too busy to meet the President of the US, but it's lost on me. As far as I'm concerned, it's plain dumb. But such is life. My colleague at CNE, Tim Evans, was able to go and this picture is the upshot.

To say I am insanely jealous would be quite wrong. My jealousy is perfectly sane.

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This has been passed on to me by a friend: it's a poem based on an assembly of various quotes from President Bush:

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope,
Where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

Well, it made me laugh.

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Letter from Alistair Cooke to Alastair Hetherington, 11th August, 1964:

...I propose that Hella [Pick] and I switch candidates from time to time, and I have impressed on her the need to be as fair as possible to Goldwater. The automatic handwringing of the European correspondents is foolish and inhibits good reporting.

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Well, I'm back. A bit. Just to keep things going, here are some brief thoughts on this week's news.

I will be returning to this theme soon, but there’s been much comment about how torn Blair is over the US election – that he’d prefer Bush to win. It’s usually assumed that it’s because of the war and security issues.

Up to a point, yes. But if you ignore the war, and look at large parts of Bush’s domestic record, it’s clear that far from being a ‘hard right’ Republican, as so many ignorant Europeans paint him, he is in many areas far more of an old fashioned social democrat than Blair – and where he isn’t to Blair’s left, he’s a model New Labour politician.

He spends without restraint. He's fiscally reckless. Tax cuts are fine - essential, I'd suggest - but they have to be matched by controls on spending. Bush has done the opposite, and forced spending to shoot up by - even worse than merely taking his eye off the ball - introducing new entitlements (such as the Medicare drugs benefit) which, like all such entitlements, will prove near-impossible to drop in future.

Spending has risen under Labour - recklessly, too. But where Bush has introduced entitlements, Labour has simply added spending to exisiting areas such as the NHS and education, which will at least be cutable.

Tactically, too, Bush is just like the left, buying off groups to assemble his own version of a rainbow coalition – the steel tariffs, and his attack on gay marriage, for example.

And elsewhere he has at the core of his policies classic New Labour traits: extending choice, promoting business, and ignoring the unions.

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Ouch.

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Marvellous Oliver Kamm post on how I and my fellow London council tax payers coughed up to find Ken Livingstone's anti-Bush soiree last week.

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Would you believe it, eh? Not only can that Texan halfwit speak in proper sentences, he’s even capable of reading a good speech and – stone the crows! – not fluffing his lines. It only goes to show what you can do with a speechwriter and some coaching.

The response to President Bush’s speech on Wednesday has been almost universally (and oh so typically British) condescending. Few have criticised its content; since it ranks as one of the finest ever delivered by a visiting - or even home grown – leader, that would be a sneer too far. Instead, reaction has been surprise, either feigned or genuine, that a gun toting moron, incapable of stringing two sentences together, managed to speak for so long, so well.

Mary Dejevsky, writing in The Independent, was typical: “Whoever has been coaching George Bush in oratory deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom (and a congratulatory glass of champagne).”

Almost the entire British chattering class seems to be animated by the same deep-seated contempt for President Bush. Even when confronted by the evidence of their own eyes and ears, that he is a thoughtful, charming, convincing, eloquent, intelligent, forceful leader, they cannot bring themselves to believe that he is as he seems. And when they do witness such positive traits, they’re clearly being hoodwinked. As The Guardian began its leader on Thursday: “Conscious that he has a bit of catching up to do, George Bush turned on the charm yesterday”.

No, he didn’t. He simply spoke as he always does: with a clarity of moral and political purpose unmatched by any American politician since Ronald Reagan, and with a charm that all who have met him confirm is entirely natural. Wednesday’s speech should hardly have come as a surprise. He did, after all, speak just as eloquently when interviewed by Sir David Frost last Sunday. It’s simply that until now they have chosen neither to listen nor to see. Last week they had no alternative, and so they decided it had to be a one-off.

What such attitudes really reveal, however, is not how much they loathe President Bush but the reality of – I choose my words carefully – anti-Americanism in Britain.

It’s a phrase that has been bandied about far too loosely of late and is usually intended – and taken - to mean a loathing and hatred of all things, and people, American. But just as a true anti-semite can seem to rebut such an accusation by pointing out that ‘some of my best friends are Jews’, so a genuine anti-American can, apparently convincingly, point out that he holidays in Florida and adores Indiana Jones films.

Real anti-Americanism – the sort which lies behind so much of the hostility to President Bush – isn’t about hating burgers and Matt Monro. It’s far more subtle. The really damaging anti-Americanism – because it blinds its sufferers to reality - derives from that characteristically British sneering superiority which so permeates metropolitan and media types.

It’s the conviction that the arriviste who has moved in next door with his flashy car and his gauche ex-model wife may have more money, own the business, and be getting more sex, but he lacks what really matters: class. That Bush fellow is just so typically American: crude and unsophisticated.

The Sunday after the World Trade Centre was destroyed, John Humphrys paraded the full scorn of the superior Brit, attacking the likes of George Bush who “damn those who did it as evil, as though there is nothing more to say, as though we still believe in a devil with a forked tail…Perhaps President Bush truly does - his Christianity is of a pretty fundamental variety.”

It’s not just President Bush. His predecessor, Bill Clinton, was equally American; just as fundamentally uncouth and unable to resist his gross appetites. But we humoured him, since he spoke our sort of language. What really offends about George Bush is that what you see is what you get, and what you see is a genuine American who makes no effort to be anything else.

We can put up with Americans who seem somehow ashamed to be American. Woe betide them, however, if they’re proud of it. They’ll have to put up with our weapon of choice: the condescending sneer.

UPDATE: Oops. My mother has pointed out to me that Matt Monro was English, and a former bus conductor. I suppose I can now look forward to a host of emails from outraged Sunday Telegraph readers...

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You are George Walker Bush! You are the most
powerful man in the world, which leaves you
little time to think for yourself. Fortunately,
you have your friends to think for you!


Which member of the Bush Administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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Do read David Carr's wonderful account of his time on the march.

The picture captions are especially good.

I had to change my plans to stage my own 'pro-protest' as I had to visit a friend in hospital, but I did stop by for a brief look. I went prepared with a couple of small Stars and Stripes, but the atmosphere was so muted - the few thousand people I saw wander past me looked as if they'd rather be tucked up at home with a nice cuppa than taking part in what must have been the dullest protest since accountants complained about new rules on company classification - that I simply couldn't be bothered. If the rabble who were marching to have Saddam restored to power couldn't be assed to chant anything, I wasn't going to start a fight.

Don't get me wrong, though: I couldn't be more relieved that my forebodings proved groundless.

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As Harry Hatchett asks, could anyone on the left - or the right, for that matter - disagree with anything said by George Bush today?

I've decided that the best response to the protestors - whether on the streets, in the media or wherever - is simply to laugh at them. After all, they can't be serious. They can't be. They are living, breathing parodies of themselves.

And, of course, laughing at them'll get their goat.

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Harry takes the Guardian's letter-writing feature more seriously than I do, and I think he may be right so to do:

...saddest of all is reading the words of 12-year-old Mickey, a little kid who has learnt to spout the SWP line:

Dear George,

I would just like to say how much I hate you. You have done nothing positive in your whole time as president. You are the reason for the poverty in the Middle East. You have no idea what you are doing. You're killing loads of people, and that is not excluding your own nation too. There are still lots of very poor people in America, and they are getting poorer.

You keep making excuses about Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, but all you were in Iraq for was the oil. Saddam had been there for 30 years, so why is it only now you decided to act? You keep talking about September 11 when all you do is bomb other countries and give Israel lots of money. It is a very bad idea that you have come over here.

I don't want to grow up in a country which is so influenced by you and your policies.
He's a 12-year-old lad.

So please don't tell me anymore about how the nihilists are just a tiny minority not worthy of attention. Please don't tell me that Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali and John Pilger are isolated individuals. They are poisoning young people and destroying what little moral credibility remained on the radical left.

I despise them and I despise that their pals in the media present them as the 'left' and leave the field free to the Tories.

But we can't leave the left to these people.

Too damn right.

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From today's Times:

Special Branch officers have also warned the American Secret Service that a "mentally deranged lone fanatic with a fixation for George Bush" may be at large in the capital.

Also from today's Times:

...the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, branded Mr Bush as "the greatest threat to life on this planet" whose policies will "doom us to extinction". The mayor also said that he did not recognise Mr Bush as a lawful president and he condemned America's "rapacious capitalist agenda."

Are they, I wonder, related?

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The Grauniad's 'letters to Bush' feature is beyond parody. My favourite is - it goes without saying - Harold Pinter's:

Dear President Bush,

I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood, with my compliments.
Harold Pinter
Playwright

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The peerless Norman Geras responds to Socialist Worker's 'What you can do' against President Bush with his own list of ten things you can do. The final one is typically lucid:

'People have already come up with a huge range of imaginative protest ideas. Let's have a festival of resistance to Bush which comes together as we flood the streets of London next Thursday.' > No, if the streets are to be flooded, let this be a festival, long overdue, celebrating the fall of Saddam, and rejoining socialists and liberals with the values so many of them have lately betrayed. Let it be a festival of solidarity with the Iraqi people, rather than - as it will be - with those who would return them to a new oppression by fomenting mayhem and civil war.

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Matt d'Ancona hits, as ever, the nail on the head:

I find it shaming that the visit of an American President should generate such ferocious loathing in this country. It is surely a cause for deep embarrassment that special measures are being taken to protect the head of state of our closest ally not only from foreign terrorists, but from Britons themselves: I do not remember any crowd control problems when President Putin, a former KGB chief and pitiless suppressor of dissent, made his state visit in June.

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This interview with Michael Moore on Channel Four News is beyond fisking. He's so off the wall - he maintains that Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq! - that even Jon Snow seems flabbergasted.

The clip is here. Click on the link marked View latest show video on narrowband. The interview starts at 8'30''.

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Perceptive words from Melanie Phillips, on the mess towards which we are heading next week:

The Americans are only now waking up the the fact that London is going to greet Bush with what at best will be massive demonstrations against him, and at worst violence, rioting and maybe even terrorism.

Frum asks how Bush's advisers could have allowed him to drift into this. I think part of the answer is similar to the reason why Israel is so useless at putting its case across. For like Israel, America is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause that it simply cannot conceive that it can be hated as much as it is. It is incredulous at the suggestion that it needs actively to win hearts and minds. It has also never bothered properly to understand Britain. It knows Tony Blair has been a staunch ally over Iraq. Er, that's it.

The Americans have been going round in a kind of bubble. It's the same bubble, insulating them from the advice of candid friends which they simply override because to listen to it might admit to weakness, which has got them into such terrible trouble in Iraq. If they had bothered to look closely at what has been going on in Britain, they would have seen that the country has been engulfed by a rising hysteria about the US and Bush: an irrationality and complete breakdown in logic, common sense and moral reasoning from 9/11 onwards which has created the ugliest, most prejudiced and most dangerous national mood that I can ever remember. But the Americans, like the Israelis, have been so wrapped up in themselves that they have never opened their eyes to this. As a result, they have been almost entirely absent from the battle for hearts and minds, leaving a vacuum to be filled by the propaganda of noxious ideologues and their compliant fellow-travellers in the media.

Regular visitors will know that I take the opposite view from the received wisdom: I think George W Bush will come to be regarded as one of the truly great US Presidents: courageous, determined and strategically and morally perceptive.

But whatever I think of him, it's clear that we are heading next week for a major disaster (disasters, I should say). First, in PR terms. And yes, that matters. It matters because the most welcome pictures the enemies of freedom and the west could imagine would be the leader of the free world being, at best, jeered, and at worst helplessly taking shelter in a palace as his host's population riot. And that must, surely, be the most likely outcome. Bush himself may not come face to face with the protestors, but he won't need to for the message to travel around the world.

But it could be a lot worse than PR - and I'm not just talking about the (very real) terrorist threat. The possibility of violence - of riots - is surely more of a probability. The organisers are past masters at engineering near anarchy, as they have demonstrated on May Day and with the Poll Tax riots. They want nothing more, and George Bush's visit is going to give it to them.

I simply don't see what possible gain there can be from this visit. For the Prime Minister, there is none. All it will do is annoy further (and that's putting it mildly) those who are already on the anti-Blair, anti-Bush warpath. And for the President? Some photo op! 'Here's one of me hiding in Buckingham Palace...and here's one of me dodging the crazy British rioters'.

David Frum says:

President Bush is not widely popular in Britain. He will not receive a warm welcome from the larger British public.

That's one way of putting it. Or how about this: President Bush is despised by the overwhelming majority of the British population, and most of them will secretly cheer if he gets a drubbing at the hands of the protestors. As Melanie points out, most Americans, even the most Anglophile, don't have a clue at the intensity and spread of the contempt for the President.

The trip is crazy. It has literally nothing to recommend it. Yes, I'll be there on the march with my stars and stripes and my 'four more years' banner. If it's going to go ahead, then I have as much right to put the other case as the scum who will march against the fall of Saddam have to put theirs. But there should be no need. It's not too late to call it off. Just talk about the need for the President to stay in DC to work on...something.

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Mark Steyn pricks the bubble of so many current interpretations of the US political scene:

Just as your rattled Democratic supporter is beginning to feel a harsh jab of reality in what Slate's Mickey Kaus calls the "liberal cocoon", the media rush to lull him back to the land of make-believe, assuring us that the Democrat defeat is attributable to strictly local factors and is definitely not part of a trend.

Oddly enough, all these non-trends seem to trend the same way: November 2002 - Democrats lose control of the US Senate; October 2003 - Democrats lose the California gubernatorial race; November 2003 - Democrats lose the Mississippi and Kentucky gubernatorial races.

...The American electorate is "polarised" in the sense that a seesaw would be with Kate Moss at one end and me at the other. The 50/50 nation of the 2000 election is gone. A small but significant sliver of the electorate shifted Right after September 11: we can argue about whether it's four per cent or 12 per cent, but not whether it exists. Who are these voters? They seem to be young, hitherto natural Democrats who aren't as hung up as their wrinkly parents on Vietnam nostalgia. A lot of them are female, which is why the so-called Republican "gender gap" the media like to harp on about was wiped out in 2002, while the Democrats' own gap with white male voters has widened to a chasm.

As for Bush merely solidifying his base, Kentucky hasn't elected a Republican governor since 1967 and Mississippi has elected only two in the past 125 years. In the swing states, the change in voter identification since September 11 is all in one direction - Florida: Republicans up six points; Minnesota: Republicans up eight points; Michigan: Republicans up nine points; Iowa: Republicans up 12 points; Arkansas (home of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library): Republicans up 15 points.

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A friend sent me this interesting take on 'Wilsongate':

One fascinating aspect of this scandal is that the Democrats have clearly learned how to do the "transAtlantic media food chain" thing. You will recall that Mark Fabiani's infamous 300-page report on the "right-wing media food chain" argued that conservatives were able to get anti-Clinton stories into the mainstream US media by having them appear first in publications like the American Spectator, whereupon the Daily Telegraph would report that the US media was saying such-and-such, whereupon a US newspaper would report that the British media was saying thus-and-so. Ba-da-bing!

Well, the Wilson story was broken and kept alive by David Korn at The Nation and Joshua Micah Marshall of the Washington Monthly, but had no takers in the major media (except for Newsday, not a newspaper that is read by the national elite). The story is now big, but no one in the mainstream media dares to print the name of the leakers.

But lo -- yesterday, a guy at The Guardian (JulianBorger) said that some reporters had told him privately that Karl Rove was one of the leakers. Today, Borger was a guest on the Michaelangelo Signorile radio show (which, I gather, runs on a national gay and lesbian radio network) and expanded on this theme. So now all the left wing bloggers can report that a guy at the UK Guardian (their version of the Telegraph) reported such-and-such, presumably making it possible for some mainstream US publication to say, "gosh, the UK media are saying it's Rove." Ba-da-bing! They have figured out how to do it.

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