Learning from History
By Peter Fredson
March 18, 2006
Having learned nothing from history, Bush is determined to repeat the worst of it. He loves to stay a course, especially if the first time it was a failure. Bush will try again and again. That may be laudable for character, but it also reflects stupidity, sheer ignorance and a fondness for fantasy over reality.
It reflects the bubble of isolation in which Bush lives, surrounded by sycophants who are determined to put a positive spin on incompetence, death and drowning. It demonstrates incomprehension of reality. It seems like the Brown Shirts of Berlin have been "reborn" in our own country
In this bubble Bush gets on with a comfortable life, with minions eager to do his bidding, in which he can strut, swagger, smirk and smile all day without any care or responsibility. The famous Buck never seems to make its way to his desk.
Neither drought nor flood touches him, compassion never raises any ugly demands upon him, his agents sweep a sidewalk so his dainty feet never touch dirt. Any protestors that get beaten will get beaten far from cameras and held far from lawyers. The media are complicit in their repetition of managed and phony news by Karl Rove tricksters.
Photographers abound to catch his every scripted action in handing out a sandwich to starving people, consoling some child whose mother his troops have killed, giving drowning victims a Kleenex, or making a speech in front of some sacred building with spotlights illuminating his pulpit and a cheering highly-selected crowd waving flags or crosses.
When Bush moves on, the cameras too move on and focus on scripted events in which Hollywood presentation is everything. The public gets all that show of Bush smirking, nodding, blinking, and smiling for just a few measly millions of dollars of public money every day. A bargain for True Believers.
He travels with an entourage said to be of about 1,000 persons. He is surrounded by secret agents, troops, police, riot squads, marine guards, and has entire army camps alerted wherever he travels so that another thousand soldiers can come to his courageous aid when he faces public criticism.
In addition, wherever he travels all army, navy and air facilities nearby will be on high alert. Submarines, destroyers, battleships, drone planes, gunships, helicopters, stealth bombers will be stationed nearby to protect our courageous war-monger.
Whatever happens to the populace, you may be sure that the administration figures will be safe, dry, sound and in some bunker. George, Dick, Karl, Donald, Condi and all cabinet and under-secretaries will be secure, cozy, untouched by any outside event.
Bush (or his advisors) show an amazing ability to subvert honest people. He took Colin Powell, a fine figure I would have considered could make a good president, and made him a lying obsequious sycophant for the neocons.
He took Condi Rice, a good academic, and made a lying sycophant neocon out of her.
He burned them irrevocably like a good slave-master for any legacy of their own, and they will go down in history as part of a gang of lying warmongers.
Bush purposely selected the worst imaginable cronies for his attorneys, and they responded as full-fledged liars for the neocons. How anyone can think of a Bolton as our Ambassador is a vile mystery.
How anyone could not know that Ashcroft was a religious fascist is even worse.
Now they tell Bush he can torture, abuse, arrest, detain, disobey any legislation because through lies he is a War President.
I don't know what War they are referring to, or where it is located, or if it was ever declared, or if it is world-wide with Bush at war with the entire world.
Bush thinks he is above the law, superior to the Constitution, and that he is able to abuse, torture, or assassinate anyone at will or send shiny missiles screaming into any country his imperial will designates as evil.
What is stunning is that the entire Republican Congress adulates Bush and every form of destructive legislation to our country that no one would have imagined could befall our beloved Democracy. They act in concert as deaf, dumb and blind to disdain for our Constitution, to the destruction of the Wall of Separation between Church and State, in favor of faith-based nonsense by which Bush as turned the Oval Office into an adjunct of the Christian televangelist corporate enterprise to which all must pay slavish obeisance.
They must be held to account in the next elections, as being complicit in the imperial plans of the Bush neocons, and as being unable or unwilling to restrain the wildest excesses of Bush and his nicely-groomed thugs.
Hitler did not act alone. The Holocaust did not come unaided. Millions of people have died because they did not speak up against tyranny. Osama bin Laden evidently had grievances against the Bush family and friends, which were ignored or dismissed contemptuously.
The huge majority of Iraqi people are not thugs, murderers, insurgents but hard-working reflective religious people. To kill thousands of them with reprehensible Shock and Awe because a loony-toon Bush was commissioned by his Old Testament God to fight EVIL is fantasy and pure unadulterated evil at its worst.
Any American who applauds Bush for spying on his own people, who arrests people without warrants, who hold anyone indefinite in vile detention without legal representation, who claims the right to torture and abuse anyone he thinks might object to his tyranny, who is an intolerable if incompetent meddler, cannot be a guardian of Democracy.
How can liberty be a gun barrel pointed at the head of an Iraqi woman who is going to market? How can sovereignty be even mentioned with 160,000 troops and mercenaries and advisors skulking with heavy weapons in every street of a nation that had done absolutely nothing to bring the Bush evil wrath upon them?
Has no Congress person noticed that Bush is building four huge military bases in Iraq. Do they know that we have spent billions of dollars but intend to abandon all the bases because we are kind-hearted Bushites?
Do they believe Bush and the protests of Condi and Donald that these are not permanent bases?
Do they believe we are building a billion dollar embassy, wrested from Iraq by force of arms in a Green Zone owned by neocons, for peaceful purposes. If so, they are the most gullible people on earth, or the most stupid, or champion liars themselves.
Mischief is afoot, and running wild.
The major question is: are we in Iraq because George, and Dick, and Donald, and Colin, and Karl and little Condi lied their heads off, and are now rewarded with fine titles, jobs, security and respect?
Do lies trump truth? Do Christians love the Bush lies? Which Senators uphold lies?
At what point did Americans decide that they wanted their President to lie, to misinform, to twist all intelligence reports, to slander, to deceive, and to keep as a state secret his lust for power?
Do Americans really want a petulant, irritable, egomaniacal, incompetent, greedy and murderous President to exemplify the best that American can produce?
Will nobody say Enough?