Georgie goes to London

The Daily Telegraph has a good story on the politics surrounding Shrub's visit to the UK. The description of the event as something that seemed "a good idea at the time" is priceless, as is the note that while maintaining a public face of solidarity, the Blair administration has been distancing itself from the actual security negotiations.

While it seems to have gotten very little notice here, those negotiations apparently involve White House demands so bizarre that Scotland Yard is alternately up in arms and shaking its head. In addition to the usual stuff we've come to expect here ("exclusion zones" designed to keep Bush from having to see even a single demonstrator), the Guardian notes that they included virtually shutting down all of central London, closing the Tube (the London subway system) against the possibility of someone blowing up a train underneath the procession, allowing Black Hawk helicopters to hover over the city, and including in the motorcade an anti-personnel rapid fire gun intended for use on tanks. The Telegraph article also reveals a demand to reconstruct part of Buckingham Palace to "strengthen the walls" of the room where Bushleague would be staying as a protection against an assault via airplane.

In addition, Bush's entourage will include a good number of armed guards. That is not in itself unusual, it seems (although apparently the number of guards is), but what really had British security slack-jawed was the demand that those guards be empowered to shoot to kill any demonstrator they believed was "threatening" Bush and that they be granted diplomatic immunity - that is, be guaranteed against any possibility of prosecution for doing so! (I don't have a link to the original article on that but the Guardian story makes specific reference to it.) Shades of 007.

I'm honestly not sure what to make of this beyond the fact that it seems to represent real concerns at the White House since all this was behind-the-scenes stuff. But what does it mean? I assume that if it was based on "credible threats" we'd have heard about it along with Scott McClellan repetitiously intoning how this president will not be deterred by terrorists, and so forth and so on. So I have to think instead that the Bush administration operates in a climate of constant fear bordering on if not crossing over whole scale into outright clinical paranoia. Do they really think that Bush is in that much greater danger than any previous president? Or do they imagine all events in the world as revolving around George Bush, cowboy boots and six-shooter, going man-to-man, one-on-one, toe-to-toe with Osama bin Laden (or Saddam Hussein or whoever is the current target)?

I expect that's a possibility, since a significant part of his administration consists of people whose political careers were forged on the anvil of the "Communist threat," the kind of people who see the world only in "us-versus-them" colors. And - oh jeez, I'm going to quote myself again, this time from January, 1990 - "conservatives without looming enemies to fear mightily and battle manfully (the word is chosen deliberately) are a lost and sorry lot." They need enemies to feel whole. In "terrorism," they have one every bit as big and ill-defined as "communist subversion." They must be both terrified and ecstatic.

So maybe the Bush gang isn't just a bunch of lying, destructive, greedheads whose only concern is the wealth and power of themselves and their corporate cronies. Maybe they're just plain nuts.

Not that there's necessarily any contradiction between those two, mind you.

Update: According to the Daily Mirror, Bush has pulled out of giving a speech to Parliament because he was afraid of being heckled by antiwar MPs. Bush's handlers "were fearful it would to turn into a spectacle with Labor backbenchers walking out," said senior White House adviser Dr. Harlan Ullman.