Bush’s bad metaphor
During his remarks to Her Majesty QE II, President Bush said
As liberty expanded in the British Isles, British explorers helped spread liberty to many lands, including our own. In May of 1607, a group of pioneers arrived on the shores of the James River, and founded the first permanent English settlement in North America. The settlers at Jamestown planted the seeds of freedom and democracy on American soil.
Bush ought to avoid that metaphor. He used it back in May 2005.
It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq, but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower, it’s a healthy, sturdy tree.
As if that ain’t enough, check out what happened after the British settlers — or occupiers, if you will — set up shop in the New World:
War repeatedly broke out, and in 1621 the chief of the Pamunkey tribe, Opechancanough, engineering an exceptionally clever, devious strategy that enabled the Indians to win the trust of the settlers and then betray it, set off “a slaughter of unimaginable proportions” that killed “at least a quarter of the settlers and [left] the colony devastated.” It was a brief and brutally costly battle. Soon thereafter the British crown took over management of the colony from the Virginia Council, and the policy of ruthless extinction was put in place. “Extirpating of the Salvages,” as the royal governor put it, was carried out wholesale; after 1622, “the Powhatans were excluded from English Virginia other than as drudges and slaves.”
That’s bad, right?
