There are many fine and wonderful things about America. Amongst those many fine and wonderful things is American idiom. America also has many fine and wonderful people. Colin Powell is not one of those people. Colin Powell has “endorsed” Obama, and his shameless opportunism has been duly rewarded. Just over two years ago I wrote about Powell’s opportunism and lack of integrity on the old site. Here’s some of what I wrote back then:
So what have we got here? We have Colin Powell who has made a lot of money and garnered a lot of adulation from having made a career out of targeting civilians. We have an undeniably effective and talented soldier who is famous for having a military doctrine named after him. He’s got quite a record. Let’s talk about My-Lai. In his autobiography - no I’m not going to link to it I’ve more self-respect than that, Powell talks about his role in the Vietnam War and makes excuses for targeting civilians by destroying their food and homes as follows:
“We burned the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters … Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?”
[snip]
And it is Iraq that is Powell’s greatest failure. A failure of courage and a failure of integrity. His speech at the UN pressing the case for war was one “at which United Nations officials who heard it openly laughed” and was inaccurate in “almost every detail. [link]” Inaccurate is too kind - it was downright untruthful. The man lied through his teeth and his lies mean that he bears a major portion of the blame for the blood-soaked hell hole that Iraq has become.
[snip]
As I said at the start of this posting America has many fine and wonderful things and many fine and wonderful people. Powell isn’t one of them. But one of the many fine and wonderful things about Americans is their use of idiom. It can be pithy, direct, truthful - and devastatingly accurate. Americans have the perfect idiomatic expression for such politically inspired movements to rehabilitate someone who has miserably and abjectly failed his country when she needed him most . They call it “putting lipstick … on a pig.”
Putting lipstick on a pig … … … Seems like everyone is doing it these days. Doesn’t augur well for a “transformative” presidency. I’ll close with Colonel Lang’s opinion:
For Shame! For Shame!
He should hide himself and hope that someday men will remember the good of him and not the worst.
Well yes, he should, but who cares about “should” when there’s a bandwagon to climb aboard, money to be made, and histories to re-write?
markfromireland
Indexed under: American election, American War Criminals (Colin Powell), Cartoons, Editorials
The problem with Powell is that he doesn’t have any balls - he finally comes out for Obama when it is “safe’ to do so - just like he had is second in command let it be known that he was ‘duped’ over the reasons for the Iraq invasion! He is pathetic!