The nation’s highest award goes to … you’ve got to be kidding

Wanna get sick? Take a look at the photo on the front page of today’s New York Times of George W. Backrub putting the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of none other than George Tenet. Yeah, that Tenet. The Clinton holdover at CIA who repeatedly flopped in the most vital areas of national intelligence (remember “It’s a slam dunk!”?), who finally, three years too late, was forced out of his job last summer, but to whom President Backrub, apparently for reasons of personal affection, couldn’t resist handing our nation’s highest civilian honor.

Backrub’s giving Tenet that medal was a slap in the face to the public that was very similar to his renewing of his insane open-borders plan immediately after conservative voters had re-elected him, at the end of a campaign in which he had barely mentioned immigration. It’s a fundamental demonstration of the man’s character. For Backrub, personal feelings are everything, replacing principle, honor, and duty. He has a “feeling” for Mexicans, so he keeps insisting that we hand our country over to them. He digs Tenet (God knows why), so he’s just got to give the arrogant little putz the President Medal of Freedom.

In fact, my “backrub” moniker for the president is more accurate in this case than I realized when writing the above. As I’ve said before, Bush’s m.o. is to give his enemies a backrub, they stab him in the back, then he gives them another backrub.

Well, Tenet was CIA chief during the very time that important elements within the CIA were actively seeking to undermine the president and even cost him the election. The proof that this was happening is that as soon as Tenet’s successor Porter Goss took over CIA, he began firing disloyal officials. Clearly, one of the reasons for Tenet’s own departure was his failure to stop, or perhaps his passive cooperation with, these anti-Bush elements in the Agency. So, by awarding Tenet, Bush is not just expressing personal affection, he is perfectly enacting the scenario described above, giving his enemy a backrub, just as he wants to give a backrup to the whole Mexican nation, which fiercely resents the United States, and whose president sought to undermine Bush between the 9/11 attack and the invasion of Iraq.

And this is the man who, we are told over and over, insists on “loyalty”?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2004 09:33 PM | Send