Reckon the first journalist to jump on the “Poppyâ€? thing was Maureen Dowd of the NYT in her book, “Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk”. The following exerpts are most enlightening on the Mozartian relationship that W. has with his father, and the scope of President Bush’s literary inquisitiveness. In history’s broad sweep, however,Harvard’s loss of a potential scholar, was to be America’s gain.

“From an exclusive conversation on the one-year anniversary of Katrina landfall
By Brian Williams
Anchor & “Nightly Newsâ€? managing editor
Updated: 6:38 p.m. PT Aug 29, 2006

WILLIAMS: Mr. President, I know how much you love deep psychological examinations of yourself. While you were at Kennebunkport this last weekend, people talked about your relationship with your dad. People mentioned that former President Clinton has been a guest at Kennebunkport more often in the last few years than you have been. (Bush laughs.) And there was a lot of speculation and your spokesman Tony Snow recently all but said it’s because it was the way your father chose to end the first Gulf War that Bin Laden saw weakness enough to strike the United States. Is there…

BUSH: I am trying to see where you are going with this (laughs).

WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.

BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.

(Later in the same interview)

WILLIAMS: We always talk about what you’re reading. As you know, there was a report that you just read the works of a French philosopher. (Bush laughs)

BUSH: The Stranger.

WILLIAMS: Tell us the back story of Camus.

BUSH: The back story of the the book?

WILLIAMS: What led you to…

BUSH: I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeare’s.

WILLIAMS: This is a change…

BUSH: Well, I’m reading about the battle of New Orleans right now. I’ve got an eclectic(ek-a-lec-tic in W-speak) reading list.

WILLIAMS: And now Camus?

BUSH: Well, that was a couple of books ago. Let me look. The key for me is to keep expectations low.�

Yeah, right.

Some backstory here.

Eddixinder – Alexander (Downer).

Beltway buzzards – scuttlebut around Washington; this is a very in-sounding phrase that Mr Combatant must have picked up blogging on US sites, it makes him sound in the know.

Home by Christmas – Promises generals make about troops when they first make war. General Haig to British PM Herbert Asquith who then repeats it to the people of Britain in September 1914 during the Battle of the Marne; Adolf Hitler when launching operation Barbarossa in June 1941 (hence Mr Combatant’s reference to Stalingrad is misleading); Field Marshall Montgomery about impending German collapse on the Rhine in September 1944; McArthur tells this to Pres Truman at the start of the Korean War (I am not counting Bing Crosby’s hit song of 1943).

AmPol – American foreign policy. Not to be confused with with Australian Motorists Petrol Company, Ampol (now delisted following acquisition by Pioneer International and merger with Caltex).

Tragics – fans. Did this originate with John Howard and cricket? Didn’t he come up with “barbecue stopper” as well? Just think, that’s what he’ll be remembered for.

Pink mist – snipers’ jargon, refers to what looks like pink mist through binoculars emanating from the top of target’s head when a high-velocity bullet exits the skull dragging cranial fluid in its wake through the exit wound. This is insurgents’ snipers targeting of US Forces. But I think “roadside ied incidents” would have been more pertinent, however “IED” gets a mention later.

MSM message – mainstream media message, in other words, consistent propaganda from the US administration aimed at the general population; this is supposed to be simple and repetitive because of a supposed short attention span of the average media consumer in the US street.

Chanelling – obtaining guidance from beyond the grave, in this case, actor David Strathairn from the deceased broadcaster Ed Murrow, whom the former is impersonating in the film about McCarthyist witchunts Good Night and Good Luck. Chanelling, I think, originated with people who took too much LSD around the Big Sur in California and imagined they were guiding flying saucers with their brain waves. But I’ll be happy to be corrected on this fascinating concept.

Bottle – Cockney slang for courage, probably from bottle and glass, rhyming slang for arse, hence cool assurance; corollary: lose one’s bottle – be incontinent in face of danger.

Baizez-moi – I think this is a mistranslation of “well, fuck me” as an expression of Mr Downer’s wisdom, but ironically so, among the diplomatic corps in Washington. Anyhow, the conjugation is all wrong from baises. And it probably isn’t idiomatic French.

Poppy – allegedly what the current US president calls his father, HW Bush. My recollection is “Dad”. How did this “Poppy” thing start anyway? I suspect it’s a Beltway myth.

Bardsplatter – that is an interesting neologism. Christopher Marlowe, armed with a .44 magnum finally nails his main competitor? I think this is a re-reference to the earlier “three Shakespeares and a Camus”. I am not able to explain the Shakespeare point in connection with George W. Bush but the Camus is an allusion to a speech Dubya made in Europe to political leaders in 2005 when he tried to correct the impression that he was a cretin. I found this lovely quote he used from L’Etranger: “We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that ‘freedom is a long-distance race.’ We’re in that race for the duration.”

This is a bigger project than I anticipated. I think there is a PhD in this and it’s far more interesting than studying the Bible. And I haven’t even scratched the surface.

http://www.worldpoliticswatch.com/article.aspx?id=457

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/09/world/middleeast/09dems.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In Modern America, generic Commies no longer feel The Crucible’s heat. But, whaddaya know, there’s terrorists everywhere.

Realpolitik of the surge (as the civil war grows uglier): to secure spigot access and facilitate oil export to the “free marketâ€?; to maintain the facade of governance from Baghdad’s Green Zone, by minimising “pink mistâ€? incidents and keeping the MSM message tight as; and lest we forget, to keep MIC stocks zinging.

Yep. (Whatever MIC is?)

The US does not need to have Iraq peaceful the length and breadth. It just needs a little clear working space, defined borders with Iran and other meddlers and then the ungrateful natives can choose to die in each other’s ditches or not. Up to them, as the neo-neocons’d now be saying. The US will try to build out from a secure centre. They’ve got decades.

It’s all very Raj at this point. But no sign yet of Ghandi and Nehru on the horizon.

Meanwhile the world is irrelevantly debating whether Bush’s latest troop movement is too many or not enough. Perfect. Until people admit that the US has already won, it won’t be seen that Bush’s insistence on staying until he wins the “war” is a tar-baby.

Bestowing god’s gift of democracy upon Iraq hasn’t been quite the cakewalk it was pitched as, has it? One “unknown unknown” too many, I guess. Coulda happened in any war. It’s not as if this thing was unplanned or anything. Just one last surge and the boys and girls will be home by Christmas. This isn’t Stalingrad for goodness sakes.
Should enough of the D.C.Dems have the bottle, now that they have the numbers, the likelihood of a Constitutional Crisis will increase, as the consequences of raising the stakes on a losing bet in Iraq become apparent. What’s the point of Bush’s bluffing, if his opponents can read him like “three Shakespeares and a Camus”?

Realpolitik of the surge (as the civil war grows uglier): to secure spigot access and facilitate oil export to the “free market”; to maintain the facade of governance from Baghdad’s Green Zone, by minimising “pink mist” incidents and keeping the MSM message tight as; and lest we forget, to keep MIC stocks zinging.

Perhaps The Surge is but a feint, the harbinger to a sociopath’s tragic last shot at approval: “Can ya see me now,Poppy, can ya see me now?”
Birnham Wood came to Dunsinane, and in the ABC’s telly Macbeth, pigs flew, but could Gulf’s Tonkin and Persia possibly be misconstrued, say, by a Commander-In-Chief whose manglespeak extends to a word like nuclear? Not the roughest,really. Besides, for Iraqis and Iranians, Bard-splatter is so yesterday. The New Season’s I.E.D.s and smart nukes dictate that pink mist and vapeur-de-nuke are simply a must way-to-go in 07.