Wow. Fourty years ago today, George W. Bush first found his name in print in the New York Times. At the time, Bush was a senior at Yale and former president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Did the NYT report on Bush's academic excellence, future promise, or civic spirit? Uh, not exactly. Follow me below the break to find out more.
George W. Bush's first appeared in the NYT under a headline entitled "BRANDING RITE LAID TO YALE FRATERNITY". His fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, was at risk of being banned from Yale for using red-hot coathangers to brand initiates with the Greek letter Delta.
Did George W. Bush stand up and speak truth to power? Did he take a stand against inflicting sadistic, homoerotic pain on the "lower backs" of pledges?
Nah...
A former president of Delta said that the branding is done with a hot coathanger. But the former president, George Bush, a Yale senior, said that the resulting wound is "only a cigarette burn."
http://select.nytimes.com/...
Flash forward 40 years. The US President who's tenure has become synonymous with torture is still minimizing human suffering. He is still obsessed with inflicting pain on persons under his control. The Administration is still debating whether waterboarding is torture, still trying to come up with rationalizations and justifications for inflicting suffering on other human beings.
I don't have a lot of time to go into the psychopathology of George W. Bush. But it is instructive to see how little the man has changed over the years.
My hope is that just as George W. Bush's first mention in the NYT involves torture, that his obituary will also focus on his disgraceful embrace of torture as US policy. It may well be that the intentional infliction of pain and suffering will bracket this small man's entire life story.