I see George Bush as a dangerous proto-fascist who endorses every scam his handlers concoct to profit the elite members of his wealthy class who are making the selfish decisions that are swiftly turning the American democracy into a virtual dictatorship.
The current outbreak of global capitalism is but one scam of the financial aristocracy. You can count on it -- the ruthless neo-cons or proto-fascists now in control of the White House, the Senate, House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court, are working night and day to propagandize us into meek acquiescence as they destroy our American Republic. No more financial aristocrats than can be carried aboard a single Boeing 747, have cornered over ninety percent of all American wealth. They are the people who are casting America on the scrap heap of history by literally buying our congressional and presidential elections. They don't even need a Latin American style military coup when they can use a tiny fraction of their enormous wealth to corrupt the souls of the few hundred politicians who do their bidding. The narcissistic cabal is doing everything possible to propagandize naïve Americans into surrendering our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for their own benefit. Their major modus operandi is to frighten naïve persons into seeing danger on every hand. The vast majority of neurotic and psychopathic users and abusers of humankind cannot help themselves. Their souls are beset by gnawing anxieties. As a result of severe childhood traumas or possibly some genetic flaws, they feel themselves under constant attack by dangerous enemies such as populist politicians, liberal professors, psychologists, and public broadcasting executives who expose their scams in order to present a balanced view of the world. The abusers want you to accept their imaginary enemies as real and to believe that they alone can protect you and your family from them. The narcissistic triad of religious fundamentalists, political reactionaries and manipulative financial aristocrats use the world's most potent propaganda machine to invent enemies and to persuade you to hate them, even when none exist.
For example, the entire flap about stem cell research, contracts for gay lovers, evolutionary science and the assault on each couple's right to plan and space their children, is a propaganda ploy used by the narcissistic triad to confuse people about maintaining an affluent middle class in a viable democracy. Every medieval tyrant worth his salt understood that by keeping his peasants quarreling among themselves, they couldn't unite to dethrone him. Neurotic or psychopathic power players need enemies as much as normal men and women need lovers. They seek villains to blame for their constant anxiety, to justify to themselves the roiling turmoil that infects their souls, that makes them eager to dominate and pillage any and all less powerful persons so they can feel good about themselves. Without enemies to explain away their anxieties and hostilities, they are unable to blame anyone but themselves for the feelings of ineptness and vulnerability that have roiled around in the unconscious aspects of troubled souls since childhood. Of course you can see how driven most selfish men and women are in the old quip -- Anyone can become very rich. You need only to think about nothing except making money and to love no one who doesn't make money for you for the next thirty years. Their ceaseless scramble for more and more power, possessions, prestige and pleasure than any person can use, is the ultimate Freudian defense mechanism of neurotic and psychopathic men and women.
It seems obvious to me that George W. Bush has nudged James Polk out of the running as the most inept, most dangerous president in the history of the American Republic. I believe that he grew up in this category of users and abusers. And with his approval rating in the cellar, wavering around thirty-six points, a great many Americans evidently agree with me. As President Lincoln reputedly said; "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." We finally seem to have become be aware of what this man and his handlers are costing our country. Apparently the only men and women who still think George Bush a great leader of the American Republic are like the carefully coifed and bejeweled women delegates at a recent Texas Republican convention who chanted -- We are the true Americans -- we are the true Christians. These are some of the narcissistic abusers in fundamental worship, reactionary politics and manipulative finance who share Bush's egoistic craving for wealth and the power it produces. These are ruthless power players who see the American people as serfs who deserve to serve the aristocracy for a pittance. Not only has Bush and his ruthless reactionary cabinet and staff savaged the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by making choices that destroying middle class democracy and replacing it with a fascistic government by and for his elite class, he has blundered into a series of very dangerous unintended consequences in the Middle East.
We, the sincere and honest men and women of America who work hard and follow the rules and pay our taxes, have been abused and made vulnerable by the many wannabe stooges of the narcissistic abusers who ignore the due processes of law on which our Republic is based. Abusers arrest and imprison American citizens without a shred of legitimate evidence. Just recently the American government was forced to pay a Muslim American a hundred thousand dollar settlement because the FBI kept him imprisoned and suffering mental and physical abuse in a maximum security facility -- for a year after they knew he was innocent of any connection with El Queida terrorists. The proto-fascists of this administration have initiated secret Star Chamber type hearings where the accused are denied a legal defense or even allowed access to the charges against them. At one recent Quaker discussion of the administration's Middle East disaster, three of the five persons present were undercover agents who kept urging the two straight men to violate some law so they could arrest them. Entrapment of Americans has become a major modus operandi of this administration.
This president, whom I feel has been inept and insecure emotionally from childhood, is apparently consumed by many hidden anxieties. He was a poor student who had been criticized to the point of emotional abuse by a deeply disappointed mother, a pretty boy betrayer of naive girls attracted to his wealth, a mediocre National Guardsman kept out of danger by a powerful father who wanted another boy to go into Vietnam in his place and a three time business failure who was finally bailed out with an outright gift by his parent's political allies.
Bush must recognize at some level of consciousness, had he not been a Walker/Bush son, he would now be selling used cars or tending bar in some road house in Midland, Texas. His aristocratic name was his only stock in trade, his passport into the country club world of wealth and prestige. He never once faced up to a serious challenge and resolved it as a strong person does to win his own spurs. He never found an area of life where he knew he was superior, where he could shine. And he still hasn't, even after his excursion into politics. His governorship of Texas as well as the presidency of the United States was purchased for him by the oil barons of Texas and rubberstamped by the Supreme Court when he lost the popular vote. His governorship of Texas culminated in the near collapse of public education, the safety network for poor people and the destruction of many state highways as he slashed taxes for his class of aristocrats. Even his presidency is the product of the most vile, most dishonest propaganda attack possible on every opponent. George Bush who hid in the National Guard and Dick Cheney who sat out the war with college deferments during the Vietnam War -- did everything possible to destroy the reputations of John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry, all of whom bled for America while they were boozing and fornicating their way through the Indochina debacle. I believe that virtually everything Bush believes and does is ideological in nature, because he is incapable of maturing beyond the greedy, elitist values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices the Texas style true believers live by.
Almost every narcissistic aristocrat understands he or she is not especially loved by the peasants. Uneasy lies the head which wears the crown -- is more than a cliche'. Most honest people still believe that: Behind every great fortune is concealed an enormous crime. Bush authorizes illegal surveillance with secret wiretapping, encourages the use of torture by surrogate nations like Poland, Pakistan and Egypt and tolerates the brutal humiliation of hundreds or thousands of innocent suspects. The Bush administration has punished a few low level grunts with years in prison while carefully protecting the officers who gave the orders to abuse the prisoners in ways that are certain to create tremendous anti-American resistance recruit many new terrorists. Abu Ghraib Prison was just the tip of the iceberg and every enraged father, brother or cousin in the Middle East hates what they see as the administration's hypocrisy. And while most Saudis, Iranians, Egyptians and Iraqis for years excused the American people for their governmental excesses, they now tell one another there are no longer any innocent Americans. Many enraged Middle Eastern people have come to blame we ordinary citizens for repeatedly electing American politicians who finance, arm and train the brutal forces of their own murderous rulers. Of course, our proto-fascists remain so anxious and so narcissistic that they still insist they can defeat a billion resentful Muslims with military might. They press their ideological agendas under the pretense of protecting America from terrorism. Fear always sells better than hope to frightened voters. Had the 9/11 attacks been blocked, the always fearful reactionaries would created another enemy and propagandized us into letting people like Cheney, Frist, DeLay, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Alioto and others, whom I believe to be proto-fascists, to pursue their own selfish ends. I might accept their claim to be protecting the nation, were they not creating ten new terrorists for every soldier of the night they stop.
I'm convinced that this is how the Bush neo-conservative, anti-middle class, aristocratic class war works. George Bush seems determined to have no one serve in his administration that is more intelligent, more truthful or more psychospiritually mature than he himself. His modus operandi appears to be:
If you cannot dazzle the American people with your brilliance, you can always blind them with your bull-bleep.
But then, what more than spin, spin, spin and deceive, deceive, deceive -- can be expected from the narcissistic triad of spiritually bankrupt fundamental clergy, primitive reactionary politicians and selfish financial manipulators, who created an illusion of their patriotism through the world's most potent propaganda machine. The proto-fascists have created a chimera of responsible patriotism that has nothing to do with their careful makeover of the intellectually, spiritually and psychologically challenged George Bush. On the advice of his guru Karl Rove, he even professed to have been born again spiritually, for such God speak sells well in Texas and most other Red States.
Reactionaries and fundamentalists have always wanted their preachers dramatic and their politicians religious. When Episcopal Bishop Leonidas Polk concluded his last sermon in his cathedral, he dramatically threw his robes open to reveal himself clad in the gold encrusted uniform of a Confederate major general on his way to war. His large congregation of slave owners gave him a standing ovation. Professing Christ sells so well to racist, sexist and anti-science true believers that it twice got Bush into the White House. However, if he did trust and follow Jesus, he soon detoured into the closest posh country club. Consider when the Texas oil barons first offered him support if he's run for the governorship of Texas Bush asked Rove; "How do I talk to poor people? I've never met one in my life?" Obviously he never rang any Christmas bells for the Salvation Army, served meals in a homeless shelter or tutored struggling students, before it became politically expedient to appear to the voters as a sincere compassionate conservative. I believe his aristocratic agenda is the selfish kind that caused the historic Jesus to say: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Rove tutored Bush in enough Texas God-Speak to pass as an evangelical. Of course, his rebirth of compassionate Christian values and choices very conveniently coincided with his entry into politics when a major overhaul of this womanizing and alcoholic failure was needed. It is no wonder more and more Methodists resent him claiming membership in their denomination. One pastor recently said, "I wish he would stop professing to be one of us -- he's giving our denomination a bad name."
I think that underneath his clever good-old-boy makeover, there still lurks the reactionary womanizing alcoholic. It took a decade of propaganda and several fortunes to turn that frustrated frog into the illusion of a patriotic American -- and now it has become painfully obvious to me and many of the American people that the spiritual rebirth engineered by his consultants, has failed miserably. I believe he has retained his aristocratic ideologies through which he accepts the collapse of the American middle class and the establishment of one man rule. Of course, George W. Bush now has a massive military establishment, a nuclear arsenal and a powerful propaganda machine to bolster his fragile self-esteem in any way he pleases, should his macho delusions crumble and he start drinking again. A feckless Congress, with its dismal mid-twenties approval rating by the American people, has opted out of responsible governance and shrugged; "You the man -- the main man -- Do what you think best and we shall rubber stamp your agendas." His pretensions of leading a strong Jeffersonian democracy fail at this point:
Ideological rigidity, which can pass as strength in an era of relentless change, is one sure sign of proto-fascistic values and attitudes. One must adapt with new circumstances or fail miserably but Bush has so rigid a mindset that he cannot abandon his Texas Country club mindset to govern well.
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