Coalition of the Bullied
Proving once again that President Bush's idea of democracy involves him personally hand picking every leader throughout the globe:
The White House has declared open season on Mark Latham. One by one, from George Bush to Richard Armitage (that's the no-neck bloke built like a brick dunny) and now to Armitage's boss, Colin Powell (or semi-colon, as John Button calls him), the Bush Administration made it obvious this week it does not want Latham as prime minister if he will not adopt John Howard's - i.e., George Bush's - Iraq policies. We know this because the "Reverend" Paul Kelly, at his ecumenical, thundering best, has told us very frankly so in his master's national newspaper, the Murdoch daily, The Australian. Hallelujah, the word cometh!Six more months of Bush's presidency and the only friend the US will have left is Libyan nutcase Qaddafi.
What that word was appeared in last weekend's edition after Kelly's junior colleague, Steve Lewis, asked, with Howard's help, the question that incited Bush to declare as "disastrous" Latham's pledge to bring home by Christmas Australia's handful of 250 military people actually in Iraq, plus another 210 based outside Iraq's borders, thus leaving US forces of "about 140,000" (according to Howard) to struggle on without them. Intoned Kelly in his analysis: "George W. Bush has put it on the line - Australia's alliance with the US will be compromised with Mark Latham in the Lodge. Bush's declaration was predictable ... but still dramatic. It confirms not just that Bush and Latham cannot co-operate on Iraq but that Latham's policy is viewed with hostility in Washington..."
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