There is at least one more crucial point in our ensuing argument: the uncovering of American democratic credentials. We all know and admire the kind of freedoms in the type of open democracy that America has evolved amidst a dark slave-owing past and other cruelties in its pursuit of an affluent society. But from the beginning, this democratic sentiment has remained confined to its own borders. Outside, name any fascist, authoritarian or tyrannical state which has not been set up, financed and sustained by the American imperialists. The client states, the Latin American dictatorships and the African and Asian monster regimes—where there’s nothing like human rights—have all been eating out of Uncle Sam’s hand. Its democratic credentials lose their validity the moment its frontiers are left behind.

Why I’ve taken such a route to finally close with George Bush’s rhetoric and its delinquencies is a question that certainly needs to be addressed. For, as I hope to show, there is an organic, constitutive link between language, thought, design and deed. What Bush and his courtiers are doing today is not a fortuitous occurrence, a "quirk" in their conduct. There are at once Freudian, lexical and socio-historical reasons that drive the White House and the Pentagon (with the massive support of their monolithic corporations and cartels) towards their perceived goals. The dialectics of their dream — not the Mayflower dream of their pioneering forefathers with their Edenic airs — are pitilessly rigorous. The umbilical link between American Protestantism and a rampaging, ravaging raw capitalism was, in fact, the theme of Buber’s celebrated thesis in The Protestant, Ethic (1904), and American polity and economic imperialism have run true to form.

The elements that go, then, into the matrix of George Bush’s rhetoric in general, go back homing to the American past. Let me now come to define the concept of rhetoric per se, for the expression has often been misused and misunderstood. Those familiar with the new linguistic theories know how the choice of words or phrases constitutes a syndrome of syntactical preferences, psychic or even pathological pressures, sociological urges, metaphysical assumptions etc.

Rhetoric was an honoured discipline in medieval Europe. Basically, rhetoric implies the power of persuasion. In other words, when the temperature of a language is raised through skilful devices of speech, the heightened idiom increases its appeal, its effectiveness. In a great writer’s hands such as Shakespeare’s or Faulkner’s rhetoric can become visionary, epiphanic. At the same time, in weaker hands, it can at once degenerate and become a simulated, fake instrument of expression. That’s why "purple prose" is often held up to ridicule. For its base is not authenticity or sincerity, but duplicity, evasion and prevarication.

And thus to George Bush. I started examining both his prepared and off-the-cuff speeches delivered during his presidential campaign. In an article, I had compared the language and personality of Bush with those of the Democratic contender, Al Gore. The former, as I concluded, had a chilly, forbidding, prickly personality, and a corresponding rhetoric of old Biblical stereotyped phrases, evangelical, pupil-sermonising overtones and self-righteous, smug assumptions. Al Gore, was by comparison open warm-hearted and effusive; his language direct, witty and fresh. Looked at from another angle, while Bush emerged as a pessimist and a cynic, Al Gore exuded a sense of ease and optimism.