No Beating Around the Bush

From Lloyd Grove's column in the NY Daily News:

Nobody needs to tell Kurt Vonnegut to stop beating around the Bush.
"They're adroit criminals," the 81-year-old literary lion labeled President Bush and his underlings while riding in a taxi with Lowdown's Hudson Morgan to Wednesday night's 27th anniversary party for In These Times, the paleoliberal magazine.

"They're committing war crimes - attacking a country that hasn't attacked us. Pretending it had. And torturing prisoners and filling countless graves with dead Iraqis. But adroit, sure. Al Capone was adroit."

The pop-culture icon added dismissively: "I don't care how Bush does, because I don't believe him. He believes himself, and that's what is quite terrifying."

As for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, they're the ones "who allowed this torture to go on, kept it secret since January. These are war crimes," Vonnegut said. "I dealt with prisoners when I was a soldier. We sure didn't torture them - we were well aware of the Geneva Convention. I myself became a prisoner" of the Germans as an Army corporal in Dresden during World War II.

"It's my country, not theirs," he continued lashing the Bushies. "And they've trashed the reputation of Americans. ... It's possible to destroy a great civilization. Bush and those people have no love for it at all."

Vonnegut - the author of "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle" and "Breakfast of Champions" - has been penning polemics for In These Times and is hoping to produce another novel.

"I've taken an advance. But now is not the time for a novel, is what Samuel Goldwyn would have said. If you have a message, send a telegram. And it's time to send telegrams right now."

What he'd really like to do is be an analyst on CNN. "What I want is - they've got all these generals and stuff and military retired consultants to CNN and so forth, I want 'em to have a retired corporal - me!"

He sure won't mince words.