Who is Mr George W. Bush ?
by Robert Thompson
OpEdNews.com
Until Mr George W. Bush became a candidate
in the Presidential Election in 2000, we ordinary folk in Europe had
never heard any details about any of the sons of George and Barbara
Bush, and our news media then started to give us some sort of
background.
What was obvious was that he was the son
of your previous President, who in his turn was mainly famous for
his vast wealth based on his connections in the oil industry, his
involvement in certain nefarious bodies such as the Carlyle Group and,
above all, his close links with the rich and powerful in Saudi Arabia
and certain other autocratic states in the Arabo-Persian Gulf.
We were also told that his grandfather had been notorious for the
crucial help which he gave to a certain Mr Adolf Hitler to enable the
latter to build up armed forces with which to subjugate much of
our Continent.
The first thing which our media told us of
Mr George W. Bush was that he was a supposedly reformed alcoholic,
with a record of business failure until he had his first success when
running a baseball team. These failures were not
thought to have been a serious matter for him, since he had the vast
family fortune behind him. It also seems that his father
could hardly have chosen one of his other sons for various reasons
connected with unsavoury stories, the details of which were apparently
well known in the U.S.A. but of which we have still heard little.
The most delightfully comic detail which
we were given was that, although the representative of a hyper-wealthy
New England WASP family, born in Connecticut, Mr George W. Bush had
decided that he wished to pretend to be a "man of the
people" (the nearest translation into any of our languages of
your expression a "regular guy") and had gone to Texas
to become a kind of pantomime cowboy, complete with ten-gallon hat and
high-heeled boots to match. All that seemed to be
missing was the pantomime horse!
The nicest things said about him were that
he had married a charming lady, who had shown great courage and
forbearance when faced with his drunken loutish behaviour, and
that they had twin daughters. We were also told that this
lady had been a school-teacher, which contrasted dramatically with his
own almost total lack of interest in intellectual matters.
Our subject had apparently been admitted,
through strong parental financial influence, to an Ivy League Campus
where he managed to scrape through the necessary examinations, but
that he had then taken care to avoid being sent to Viet Nam by joining
a soft option National Guard Unit, which would never involve him in
too much strain, effort or risk. His business efforts
having mainly failed, he seems finally to have come to terms with his
alcoholism, and on a platform of fundamentalist puritanism, he (as did
a son of the bin Laden family closely linked with his), claimed to
have been born again in the faith of his ancestors. This
impression he quickly acted to dispel when he became Goverrnor of
Texas by refusing to save even those who had been condemned to death
on extremely weak evidence.
What we here in Europe cannot understand
is what can persuade those who claim to being concerned about
morality, in particular Christians and Jews, to give their support to
such an obviously hypocritical man.
Can any citizen of the U.S.A. either show
me that the information as set out above is totally false or, in the
alternative, explain this troubling conundrum to a very confused
elderly European who tries his best to be a Christian?
Robert Thompson robert.thompson@wanadoo.fr is author of the Thoughts from France blog
