Watching the subdued cooperation in the transition of the White House from the Babylonian Captivity of Bush to the hopeful advent of an Obama era one is reminded of an interesting back story about that unusual and troubling period of transition from Bill Clinton to Bush. (December 2000-January 2001) including occult-like ritual occurring literally within hours of the start up of the Bush/Cheney tenure, following the Capitol steps swearing-in ceremony.
The Great Bush Hoax: Moral Born-againer
The Bush White House as made a grand show of religiosity and piety, of most which is a shameful charade, an outright hoax. The now famous quote from GWB, early on in his political career said it all. Bush said, in politics, he’d never be "out good ol’ boyed or out Christianed again."
More below the fold...cultist ritual in the Oval Office...
Lying, perfidy, bold deceptions, rampant unrepentant civic evil, greed, warmongering, and near total incompetence, sophomoric language and behavior came to inhabit the very walls of George W. Bush’s Oval Office. Albeit, the great Evangelical and Fundamentalist moral leaders of our country have remained tongue-tied and silent in the midst of it all. Bush’s limpid claims to high religious morals and ideals have beguiled them and betrayed us all. Even though as late as January 2007, The Church Report Magazine, touted G.W. Bush as 11th out of 50 top evangelicals in the country. @ http://www.thecronline.com/...
Albeit, Bush's personal religious activity, such as complying with the Evangelical rule "required faithful attendance to Sunday services," has been woefully sporadic. Dr. Martin Marty once classified the Evangelical category of faith as having a key emphasis on righteous "behavior," by this measure too, Bush is grievously lacking.
George W. Bush eventually emerging as the winner of the 2000 presidential election appeared on the David Letterman Show. ( http://www.youtube.com/... @ TimeFrame 2:53 )
and gave his famous Top Ten Items:Changes I'll Make in the White House. George W. made a joking remark that the first thing that he would do is to "Give the Oval Office one heck of a scrubbing." A titillating laughter swept the audience.
What was not known to the audience that night, nor to the nation, is that George W. Bush literally determined, then, or very shortly thereafter, no doubt with the help of Karl Rove, that Bush would make an auspicious show of "cleansing" the actual Oval Office physical space, top to bottom.
During a campaign appearance on "The Late Show" with David Letterman last fall (2000), Bush joked that a post-Clinton office scrubbing would be a top priority - but never gave a hint that he actually meant to do it. -– New York Daily News, 1/21/01
Bush, carrying out his "scrubbing" did so creating a useful "preacher’s illustration", a working myth, a fairytale concerning his own pretense to be a "holy" convert, a man whose own life was radically changed by God to live a high order religious life and making a bold promise to have an administration which would be at all times above the sins of Clinton. Gov. George W. Bush campaigned on a pledge to "restore honor and decency to the Oval Office."
Paul Begala relates some of the ways the incoming Bush White House sought to communicate their professed "honor and decency," moral superiority:
They told the press that in this Oval Office the gentlemen would wear suits, the ladies, skirts. And no more paper coffee cups. Nothing but the finest bone china. The Bushies even claimed moral superiority because of their punctuality. Everything was designed and marketed to stress the virtue of the Bushies and the vice of the Clintonians. And it worked. In the first year of George W. Bush's presidency, one major media figure told my wife and me to our faces that the difference between the Clinton crowd and the Bush team was that, "They're just better people than you are. They're more loyal to their President, more patriotic, less self-interested and ambitious. They're just better people." (Emphasis Added)
The False Moral Superiority of the Bush White House, Paul Begala @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... October 28, 2005
Bush sought politically to establish his image as a man changed by God and given better morals than those of he expressed during his unending adolescent and "prodigal" period as a wise cracking slacker and addict--having become a self-proclaimed born-againer. Bush’s bold claim would play well to his strong-convictions religious base and to the wider audience he had across the nation. But it was all basically lies and rank deception, a useful religious myth, political and potent. The Evangelical leadership was either swept up or willingly silently conspiratorial, allowing Bush’s claim to continue unchallenged throughout the eight years of Bush’s tragic reign.
However it all started out very differently:
As one of his first acts as president of the United States, George W. Bush ordered a top-to-bottom scrubdown of the Oval Office complex where his predecessor carried on a messy affair with a 23-year-old White House intern.
Bush had "a SWAT team" of two dozen cleaners scour his future workplace,
beginning just four minutes after he took the oath of office, the New York Daily News reported Sunday. (Sunday, Jan. 21, 2001, Bush Clean-up Team Scrubs Clinton Stains From Oval Office)
Rev. Rick Curry, a politically active Evangelical minister from Pensacola, Florida, Politics in Black and White; Drawn-Out Dispute Over Florida Results Highlights Persistent Split Among Congregations by Race and Party, Hamil R. Harris, The Washington Post, Dec 16, 2000.
In Pensacola, [Rev. Rick Curry] last Sunday delivered a sermon, "The Gleaming Light on the River," that also included oblique references to the election.
"When the way seems dark and the waters seem troubled, God has a way of reflecting his light to a dark world," he said.
Several months before the election, Curry helped form a group called United in Prayer for Pensacola.
Rev. Curry, who headed this prayer group, sponsored pro-Bush activities in the 2000 Presidential election as were reported in the Washington Post, spoke at a church in nearby Fort Walton Beach (following the outcome of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of G.W. Bush) revealing scintillating insider details as to what was also a part of this Bush "cleansing" of the Clinton Oval Office. Curry told of having been contacted subsequent to the article appearing in the Washington Post by a kind of fervent righteous posse formed inside the Clinton White House staff.
The Rev. Curry reported this intensely active cadre which had formed itself into an anti-Clinton "prayer" cell and said the group had sent him an E-mail detailing various extra curricula activities which the group instigated on the inside. He read from a copy of the E-mail which he labeled confidential. Rev. Curry’s information dovetails with other accounts.
The New York Daily News account published during the corresponding timeframe tells us the following:
Besides the removal of whatever physical stains Clinton left behind, Bush ordered an immediate revamping of his office's decor - including the removal of almost every artifact from the Clinton era.
Among the items swept away by the Bush clean-up SWAT Team: Clinton's gold
Damask Oval Office drapes, his gaudy royal blue floor rug and couches upholstered in glitzy cherry red and cream silk.
What was not reveled publicly or included this news account, according to Rev. Curry, was that a "deep cleaning" included lots of strong chemicals and a vigorous "scrubbing," deep cleaning, of every inch of the Oval Office, and, as the News account details, the removal of the carpeting and other Clintonesque fixtures:
By day's end, (1/21/00) there was little to suggest Bill Clinton had ever been [in the Oval Office]," reported the New York Daily News.
The impetus behind this physical scouring of the former Clinton space was both a strong symbol of Bush’s promise to clean up after Clinton, (restore honor and dignity), and also included a pagan-style dedication ceremony/ritual or exorcism with which was to seal out Clinton stains and immunize George Bush from evil. Acts were intended to brand the bold public promise of George W. Bush to usher in a era of "no tolerance for scandal" and the taking of the ethical "high road."
The New York Daily News expanded:
From 1995 through 1997 Monica Lewinsky and ex-President Clinton had sex in the hallway and annex just outside the Oval Office door and often left behind towels stained with lipstick and other substances for White House stewards to clean. Clinton sometimes used the Oval Office sink to finish the encounters.
Rev. Curry’s contact with inside employees revealed their mission was to ritually cleanse and physically clean the White House of what they perceived is the evil stench of the Clintons.
Even one of the president's naval valets, who had been summoned before the Starr grand jury, testified he and other attendants feared picking up tissues found around the Oval Office because of the presidential stains.
http://www.newsmax.com/...
Recall also the spurious and damaging accounts of extensive vandalism committed by the outgoing Clinton staff which was later disproved and disavowed. None the less, in Atwater-style much damage was done, public memory is etched with those exaggerated and false claims. This was the work of devious and dangerous agents of disinformation—a small portent of worse things--many evils to inhabit the West Wing during the fateful Bush years.
Rev. Curry further revealed this clandestine cabal has taken the very unusual precaution of bringing to the White House, from special European sites, dirt believed to be mingled with the blood of martyrs. This soil has been ritually spread about the Oval Office in a secretive manner to ward off the Clinton evil which they believed was physically and spiritually present there.
This prayer group communicating with Rev. Curry revealed itself as having taken on the mission to sanitize every room of the White House utilizing a through physical cleaning and an arduous, difficult set of religious incantations designed to "prepare the White House for George Walker Bush."
Little did the "scrub squad," the sprinklers of martyral soil and the reciters of the special protective prayers know or ever imagine that George W. Bush’s tenure would be a spectacular moral and civic failure, creating a moral debacle of historic proportions with impacts far beyond the dalliances of Bill Clinton in that space.
PRWeekly adds to the mix:
Our nation's 43rd president made ethical revitalization a centerpiece of his campaign. And though the well-publicized refurbishing of the Oval Office (including a new coat of paint and a new carpet) could be seen as a fulfillment of that promise, nothing spoke so loudly as the advice he - very publicly - offered to his new staff.
At the swearing-in ceremony, held on his first day in office and carried on national TV, President Bush briefly but sternly lectured the assembled mass of appointees. 'We have all taken an oath,' he said, 'and from this moment on it is our jobs (sic) to honor it.
'I expect every member of this administration to stay well within the boundaries that define legal and ethical conduct. This means even avoiding the appearance of problems.'
-- PR PLAY OF THE WEEK: Bush impels staff to 'scrub' trouble, DOUGLAS QUENQUA, January 29, 2001 @ http://www.prweekus.com/...
How unimaginably far from that standard would G.W. Bush go!
The Bush evil would dwarf and out "evil" Clinton and all previous presidents (including the sinister Iran Contra affair under Reagan, and the dark intrigues of Richard Nixon during Watergate and the illegal bombing of Cambodia) to ever have inhabited that civically dedicated space, the office of the presidency, and leaving a moral and civic stench. The damage to our democracy is inestimatible.
The deep stains and the rupture of the sacred trust and confidence of the nation in the goodness of a United States President of a nation thought to be "exceptional" in God’s favor, and "a light to all nations," are forever etched and scratched in the walls and floors of a space so central, so important, to our mythic confidence, trust, and willing support of our Chief Executive.
It is a time to call for honest national repentance.
The Hebrew scripture talks of God’s people coming to God’s altar of repentance and being rejected by God for their insincerity, shallowness and unrepentant ways. National repentance must be genuine and productive.
Amos 5:10-15: You people hate anyone who challenges injustice and speaks the whole truth in court. You have oppressed the poor and robbed them of their grain. And so you will not live in fine stone houses you build or drink wine from the beautiful vineyards you plant.
I know how terrible your sins are and how many crimes you have committed. You prosecute good men, take bribes, and prevent the poor from getting justice in courts. And so, keeping quiet in such evil times is the smart thing to do!
Make it your aim to do what is right, not what is evil, so that you may live. Then the Lord God Almighty really will be with you, as you claim he is.
Hate what is evil, love what is right, and see that justice prevails in the courts. Perhaps the Lord will be merciful to the people of this nation who are still left alive....
Amos 5: 21-24: The Lord says, "I hate your religious festivals, I cannot stand them! When you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. I will not accept the animals you have fattened to bring me as offerings. Stop your noisy songs, I do not want to listen to your harps. Instead, let justice flow like a steam and righteousness like a river that never goes dry."
The workers of the Bush evil were legion: Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Ollie North, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith , "Pat" Robertson, "Scooter" Libby, Michael Gerson, Alberto Gonzales, Justice Rehnquist, Jeb Bush, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and so many more.
Even now, George W. Bush is likely to further compound his tragic and debased tenure with his up-coming presidential pardons and commutations.
How very tragic! Many true believing conservative Christians have been so thoroughly snookered by this Bush chicanery and deception.
The transition from a failed Bush administration to a new Obama era is fraught with many heavy burdens created and compounded by George W. Bush, who, by faking his Christianity and moral credentials, willfully led his country into shame, disgrace,economic disorder, and ruin.
God save America and the world from the grievous sins of George W. Bush.