Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Bush the Jacobin

Bob's friend Francois (U. Montreal) had an NYT Op-Ed this week comparing President Bush, and his Administration, to the Jacobins of revolutionary France.

Definitely worth a read.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Francois and I are having dinner Saturday (I'm buying) settling a bet that we made in Feb or March 2006: that George Bush would leave office prior to July 1 2007, by whatever means (I took what was later revealed to be the losing side).

And Francois took the winning side not because of his over-arching confidence that Bush could right himself: but because he believes there is no end to the hole that the American people are willing to dig themselves into, when they willingly accept factual lies drunk down with emotional bromides -- war will calm your fears.

Fear up; war on.

Patrick said...

The thing this article left me wondering was how did the meaning of the word come to change to mean non-state actors. Was there an evolution or did the word die and become reborn with this other meaning. If it's the latter, if it wasn't changed by linguistic jiu-jitsu to refer to the other party in the conflict, does it even matter that this word had a previous life where it referred to the other party.

Unknown said...

Does it matter that the word had a previous life? Of course not --

except to those who think that the only people capable of terrorizing a general population are a disaffected outlaw micro-minority, rather than an empowered and dominant government and their journalistic cabal, as was the case with the Jacobins.