Bush - Baghdad Bob!

Not my idea - Bill Maher apparently started it - but if the meme fits (and you’ve got to admit it does!), then stick him with it!

You folks no doubt remember “Baghdad Bob” (real name: Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf), Saddam’s press flack, whose Sunni optimism in the spring of 2003 simply floated above reality, as if the US troops driving towards Baghdad didn’t exist. Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher (see above link) gives us a retrospective sampler of his work:

Doesn’t it sound a lot like the surreal optimism of our C-in-C?

Two men, a year and a half apart, both living in a “fantasy world of spin,” in John Kerry’s elegant phrase.

Can’t make it any more clear than that, just why Bush needs to go. At a minimum, leadership needs to have some contact with the real world; otherwise, the leaders take the followers over a cliff.

Where did ‘Baghdad Bob’ come from? I think ‘Comical Ali’ is far funnier.

I’m sick of the word “meme”. Especially when someone has just learned it, and is using it in every OP.

Yeah, that’s one that’s going around these days.

:wink:

:smiley: Too easy.

:rolleyes:

Normally I might agree with you, but do you have to be so smarmy about it?

Yeah. Jeez, it’s not like the OP has a PhD in a field where this idea is discussed regularly. Oh, wait a minute, he does. :smack:

But I’m sure that the OP’s qualifications and experience in no way trump your having read about Dawkins’ idea in Omni magazine years ago. :rolleyes:

“meme” is forgivable, no more malignant than “paradigm”. But “Sunni optimism”!?

Drag him out and shoot him, I’ll swear out the warrant later…

Shoot luc too while you’re at it for having made me notice that awful pun, which I mercifully failed to get when I read the OP.

Is it just me, or was “Baghdad Bob” a lot more believeable?

It’s just you. :stuck_out_tongue:

Shouldn’t they be calling him Baghdad Bush?

You’re just jealous because he thought of it before you. Perhaps you feel threatened because your crown of Pun King is in peril.

I thought the pun was a load of shiite.

I’m shocked and awed at your cleverness.

BTW I had pun king from the chinese takeout place yesterday. mmmmmm MMMMM

All punning aside, I think the whole Bush thing can be explained quite easily. This is a man with no curiosity who believes what the people around him tell him. He also believes so strongly in the rightness of his cause that he won’t listen to other viewpoints.

Robin

Sounds about right. How did you and Airman end up together? :stuck_out_tongue:

:::d&r:::

Good question. :wink:

Actually, IRL, he’s pretty open-minded about most stuff. Just not about football. :wink:

Robin

I realized the similiarities between Baghdad Bob and the Bush Admin during the first weeks of the war. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (Baghdad Bob) repeatedly refers to U.S. and U.K. troops as mercenaries and villians. In speeches and press releases, the Bush Administration constantly referred to the Iraqi army and insurgents as thugs and terrorists. I learned that the first step in a propaganda war is to dehumanize your enemy, so you don’t feel so bad when you kill them.

More quotes from Baghdad Bob: http://www.brainyquote.com/infominister.html

That damn liberal media!

How recently qualifies as “just learned it”? I’m more annoyed by the question of how you pronounce it (me me? mehm?), incidentally.

I’ve always heard it pronounced as “meem”. The e’s are pronounced like “gene”