U
Uganda
Is a pretty funky name for a country dont you think? Uganda is very central africa and sits on one side of lake victoria, named after that famous african king, victoria. It was also the home of internationally famous nutbag, idi amin. Mr amin managed to take over the country, go completely insane and kill everybody he could, possibly the best value in the psycho dictator shoppe today. I was once on a plane that was going to uganda, but i escaped in a balloon during the carter regime. Uganda wasnt so lucky when armyvis was in the area, calling it a most unnatural disaster.
travel advice-go see the gorrillas in the pissed, if you know what i mean.
Ukraine
Thats Ukraine, not The Ukraine like some buttmunches keep on about, how would they like it if everybody went around banging on about the australia or the britain. so shut up. Ukraine was until recently part of the ussr and a large percentage of the population are russians, so much so that they dont even speak ukranian. (at least thats what a dancing chick in hurghada told me). The capital is kiev and isnt stuffed wth creamy sauce. I got quite close to ukraine once but decided slovakia was whacky enuff for me. In recent times Ukraine managed to piss off the russian bastards who tried to poison their leader with their orange flavoured revolution and got some democracy and now want to be european and nato flavoured. They may need some luck with keeping the kremlin outta town, see georgia. and how about chernobyl and radioactive lollipops? yes, that is in ukraine too.
travel advice-the expression christ on a bike should NOT be applied to beavis on his way to work
United Arab Emirates
known around the wild streets as the uae. so they are united and they are emirates and they are generally pretty arab, three of my favourite adjectives. I think there are 12 of these little camel molesting bits of sand that should be of no importance of all, but they found oil so now they are all over the place and wah wah wah. The two richest, abu dabi and dubai have gone out into the international supermarket of stuff and bought airlines, football clubs, ridiculously tall buildings, racing tracks, theme parks and islands made of sand that look like palm leaves. They are NOT democracies and being arabic, the women are second class, dont believe the hype, they can go and make in a culo.
travel advice-just fucking leave it out wont you?!!
Godblessamerica inc.
Oh dear, you kind of need a whole blog to talk about godblessamerica inc. they modestly named themselves the united states of america, ignorting the fact that they took up less than a tenth of the land mass of the americas and there are 20 or so other american states. godblessamerica inc. is currently the biggest kid on the planetary block and has a habit of being a bunghole, causing death and mayhem anywhere on the planet you care to name. Only 14 percent of godblessamericans have passports, so that says pretty much all you need to know. The country was formed by english religious lunatics and hasnt progressed much. Basically the nation could be summed up as gun shagging, bible humping racist ignorant twats. They became the main world dominators during the century of mass communication, so coca cola, nike, starbucks, mcdonalds, basketball caps and britney spears are bloody everywhere
travel advice-i would rather eat my boots after dipping them in goat shit and arsenic pudding than go to godblessamerica inc again.
Uruguay
its the other guay, just across the river plata from buenos aires. Uruguay isnt up to much these days, they have a pretty good football team, they have gum trees and theres that movie 'alive' about uruguyan rugby players snacking on eachother bottoms. the capital is montevideo which sounds like something particularly pervy involving making love to beavis's videa to me. Even the biggest bogan ignorant australians have now heard of uruguay after we beat them in the world cuppy wuppy play off match. Which caused no end of trauma for urugugugugugyans coz they believed they had a 'divine right' to go to the world cup finals, being hosts of the first ever one and twice winning the whole shebang. Large thththththht warning.
travel advice-if you cant feel your legs, you have taken too many drugs and should stop driving.
Uzbekistan
One of the stanniest of the stan family. Uzbekistan has trees and mountains but no lemurs. Central asia, former ussr, blah blah blah. notable uzbekis include err the president of uzebekistan.
travel advice-you can walk there from south africa if you really, really want to.
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- The Guardian,
- Monday November 3 2008
"Forgotten but not gone" was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that the most impassioned moment in John McCain's performance in the final debate was when he declared: "I am not George Bush."
Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.
Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself "the decider" has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush's own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.
Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners - and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.
If Bush himself has been largely kept out of sight, his baleful legacy has been visible in the McCain campaign. McCain has made much of his credentials for independence of mind, a claim which once was credible given his support for immigration reform and opposition to Bush's tax cuts. But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, all of this became less important than the lessons of the Reagan-Bush-Rove political playbook which, with the exception of the Clinton election of 1992, seemed to have a track record of unbroken success.
McCain knew this from bitter personal experience, having been on the receiving end of Bush lowball politics in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Coming out of a convincing win against George Bush in New Hampshire he was stopped in his tracks by a smear campaign conducted through push-poll phone calls in which people were asked whether they knew that the daughter McCain had adopted from Sri Lanka was in fact the illegitimate child of an affair with a woman of colour. Now you would think McCain could never reconcile himself to a politician capable of those kinds of tactics. But there he was in the campaign of 2004, stumping the country for the incumbent, ingratiating himself with the conservative base he knew he would need, even as his old Vietnam buddy, John Kerry, was being coated in slime by the Swift Boaters.
Whatever misgivings McCain might have had about adopting the hardball tactics of his 2000 adversary have long since disappeared before the blandishments of classic Bush-style operatives like Rick Davis and Stephen Schmidt. "Do you want to be pure, or do you want to win"? they must have asked right after the nomination. Ditching Joe Lieberman as a running mate and unleashing pitbull Palin was his answer.
So even while George Bush is kept at arm's length from the campaign, his campaign style lives on as Obama is stigmatised as a terrorist-friendly stealth-socialist, too deeply unAmerican to be let anywhere near the Oval Office. "He just doesn't see America as we do" says Sarah Palin trying to wink her way into Dick Cheney's seat. McCain is betting the house that this way of doing politics has at least one more hurrah left in it, and we will find out on in the early hours of Wednesday morning whether he is right.
The Bush presidency is the spectre haunting the feast in more than tactics. Although every conservative administration since Ronald Reagan has promised to deliver, through supply-side stimulation, economic growth without bloated deficits, they have never been vindicated in their blind faith in what Bush senior once rashly called "voodoo economics". Consistently, they have brought the US Wall Street crashes and recessions along with massive deficits; and yet somehow, the stake that history attempts to drive through the heart of their economic theology never puts the ghoul away.
No weight of evidence to the contrary has ever shaken the totemic belief that tax cuts can grow the economy robustly enough to compensate for drastic shortfalls in revenue. George W Bush clung to this belief even as the Clinton budget surplus was converted into a mountainous deficit, and John McCain continues to parrot the same belief with the shining face of a true believer.
Not even Gibbon could supply a story as fatefully bizarre as the ultimate consummation of Reagan-Bush conservatism, its last act: the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal. Rather like the Pope deciding that all along he really wanted a barmitzvah.
If you look at this saga as the history of a dynasty; it's come full circle. For, believe it or not, there once was a time when Bush politics was about centrist moderation. Dubya's revered granddad, Prescott Sheldon Bush, son of an Ohio railroad executive and senator for Connecticut from 1952 to 1963, was punished in the Catholic towns of industrial Connecticut for his connection with Planned Parenthood. Not only that, but he was a trustee of the United Negro College Fund, the kind of institution that made the eventual career of Barack Obama conceivable.
But the Bushes have always been selective about idealism. And even at the height of the Kennedy-Johnson apogee, Prescott and George Herbert Walker Bush were turning the pages of Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. They could smell the wind direction changing. The future of Republican money and Republican power lay elsewhere; with Texas oil. Hence the migration to Midland Texas of George Herbert Walker Bush and his makeover into a Texan who knew the ways of the corporate world; and how to bring about the Great Cosiness between government and business that seemed like the perfect feedback loop: money to power, power to money; tax breaks for the corporations; donations to those who might command the heights.
This is the politics George W Bush inherited, and he has been its faithful disciple; to the point of purging it of any remaining traces of pragmatism. It is astounding to hear rightwing talkshow bloviators rant about the predicament of the Bush administration being caused by its failure to carry out the true conservative agenda. For there never has been and never will be a more doctrinally faithful instrument of the creed. Never mind the hanging chads of 2000, the Cheney-Bush administration seized the moment to bring on the Goldwater-Reagan Rapture in which government was once and for all got out of the way of business.
So it hasn't really been all George Bush's fault, the stupendous American fiasco. He came to power armed with an ideology that was about to crash and burn; that was, years before the present tumult, already fatally disconnected from historical reality. It was on his watch that American government needed reinventing. It was responsible government that was needed in Iraq and Afghanistan; government that was desperately needed in New Orleans after Katrina, while all George Bush could manage was a fly-by. It is government that this most anti-governmental of all American administrations is learning that is needed now to save the United States from a second Depression.
In his heart of hearts I actually think the shell-shocked Dubya, somewhere in the bowels of his presidency knows this. But he is nowhere to be found, and so on goes the mad rant that health care reform and progressive taxes are the Trojan horse for socialist revolution. To which those who have another view altogether might want to say, fear not, for yours, as a Republican president once said, is a government of the people, by the people. And really it will not perish from the earth.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/george-bush-legacy-dubya
