The ultimate Bush speech, by Harold Pinter.

In our relentless attempts to mine the back files of Youtube before its new owner Google finds a way to render this great resource useless, we came across a document to be cherished: the Nobel lecture of last year's laureate, the remarkable and brilliant dramatist Mr. Harold Pinter. With our usual care for your well-being, we have judged it worth the 46 minutes it will take to watch it in its entirety. (The video consists of a 76 year-old man sitting in a wheelchair, speaking to the camera, not using any profanity. The video contains no violence, nudity, or drug use. And yet someone has flagged the material as "inappropriate." We wonder if you will have any theories as to why.)

We offer an excerpt. Our president has wasted many words over his six years in office regarding Saddam Hussein, the still-elusive Osama bin Laden, connections and not-connections between the two, and the meaning and nature of authority and America. Mr. Pinter has kindly volunteered his services as speechwriter. Often heralded as a master of compression, he has succeeded in paring down the rhetoric to its white-hot core. The "brief address" he proposes that George Bush make is a precise, luminous x-ray of the neocon skull. This is the Conservative Message. This is all there is:


God is good. God is great. God is good.

MY God is good.

Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God.

Saddam's God is bad. Except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian.

We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God.

I am not a barbarian. I am a democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy.

We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation.

I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is.

They all are.

I possess moral authority.

See this fist? This is my moral authority.

And don't you forget it.


Mr. Pinter delivers this speech well. But we would pay Broadway prices to see it delivered by the actor it was written for.