Over the Edge and Outmatched

http://www.pugbus.net/Politics/03272005_fischer.htm
President Bush Blames Drop in Popularity on Bobby Fischer
By Phil MaggittiWASHINGTON – An unusually contrite President George W. Bush apologized to the American people during his weekly radio address yesterday for ignoring renegade chess champion Bobby Fischer and “the threat he poses to the future of chess in our country.” The president, whose job approval rating plunged to an all-time low of 45 percent in a poll released on Friday, said he deserved the low rating for disappointing “decent, god-fearing American chess players.”
“I accept responsibility for squandering some of my political capital on other people’s trivial agendas while an avowed enemy of American chess was making terroristic threats against the game and the people who play it in this country. I will not allow such conduct to go unchecked. Mr. Fischer will be made to answer for his remarks.”
Bush also announced that unless “the rogue state of Iceland” hands Fischer over to American authorities “sooner rather than later,” it risks being added to the axis of evil.
“The friend of our enemy is the enemy of our nation’s friends,” declared Bush. “The United States won’t be fooled again by Iceland’s willingness to shelter terrorists.”
Ironically, Bobby Fischer was once a chess superstar in the United States, capable of drawing hundreds of people to a match. He fell from grace when he played former Russian chess champion Boris Spassky in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. The match violated U.N. sanctions that prohibited board games in Yugoslavia at the time. Therefore, the U.S. State Department issued a warrant for Fischer’s arrest.
Fischer, who won the unsanctioned match and $3.35 million, has been a fugitive from justice and the IRS ever since, hiding in a series of underground chess cells around the world. Periodically he released statements in which he threatened to train a “worldwide army of chess masters who would rise up to destroy America’s flabby, self-indulgent chess players.”
Fischer’s odyssey ended last summer when he showed up in a Japanese airport disguised as Rip Van Winkle. He was jailed after he had attempted to use a revoked U.S. passport to travel to Afghanistan. Washington requested that Fischer be deported to America to stand trial. While Japan was mulling over that request, Iceland stepped in and granted Fischer “full citizenship with all the rights and privileges that entails, including a complete catalog of Bjork CDs.”
On his way from Japan to Iceland, Fischer, 62, declared, "This was not an arrest, it was a kidnapping masterminded by the corrupt chess establishments in Japan and the United States. Bush and Koizum (the prime minister of Japan) are war criminals. They should be hung. I am an unrepentant enemy of the hypocritical and corrupt United States chess establishment.”
Despite his paranoid ravings and unsavory appearance, Fischer is a national hero in Iceland, a island nation the size of Kentucky, because he defeated Boris Spassky there in a chess match in 1972. Replays of that match are shown weekly on Iceland’s most popular television station, The Chess Network, and children in Iceland’s schools know the details of the match as well as they know their own names.
“We are a nation of chess players,” declared Gudmundur Dorarinsson Skalason, president of the largest chess club in Iceland. “We may be small (Iceland’s population is 300,000), but the Goddess Freija makes us strong.”
Freija, who is possessed of supernatural powers and exceptionally large breasts, drives a black-and-red checkerboard chariot drawn by a fiery team of knights that move either two spaces forward or backward and one space to the side—or one space to the side and two spaces forward or backward.
The Democratic response to President Bush’s address was delivered by former vice presidential candidate John Edwards, who was captain of his state championship chess team in high school. Edwards questioned the president’s “sudden commitment” to chess and implied that Bush, “who seldom attended meetings of the chess club at Yale,” was unfit to lead American chess players in this time of crisis. Edwards also warned the American people about “the dangers of trying to establish United States chess supremacy at gunpoint.”


More to the point the president bush shows how far he is willing to take the "terrorist" rhetoric. The bush is way over the edge. Let's make an enemy of Iceland by calling it a part of the axis of evil for harboring Fischer who has called the president a war criminal. Nothing personal going on here. I am beginning to enjoy Fischer's exploits--his assertion of a conspiracy seems all the more credible now--and I think American chess players will agree that the war criminal is no match for the outspoken Icelander.
In a related story Putin has his own chess champion to deal with.


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/15/russia/index_np.html
By Simon Tisdall
March 15, 2005
The decision by Gary Kasparov, the world's top chess player, to retire from the game and devote his talents to opposing Vladimir Putin will hardly induce the Kremlin's grandmaster to resign his position. But Kasparov's move reflects broader, increasingly vocal discontent over the president's perceived descent into authoritarianism. The Putin paradox is that the more he tries to exert control, the more uncontrollable a changing Russia may ultimately prove to be.
Kasparov's assertion that the country "is heading down the wrong path" echoed the words of a more formidable political figure, Mikhail Kasyanov, prime minister during Putin's first term and finance minister under Boris Yeltsin.