Under Bush, America now tortures our enemies, both real and imagined. We imprison suspects without charges, without access to legal representation and without trial. It's just not called torture these days, as our managers have adopted terms with words designed to reduce the shock value.
Bush also ran in 2000 on a pledge to restore honor to the White House.
Inheriting a US budget surplus when Bush was selected in 2000, the United States is now drowning in red ink. Our children and grandchildren have been saddled with unimaginable lifetime obligations, the interest on which threatens to permanently imprison the American people under crushing, perpetual debt.
The income gap between the rich and the poor has reached historic proportions.
More children than ever live below the poverty line.
American primary education continues to fail.
More Americans than ever do not have access to preventative health care.
An ostensibly unforeseen financial disaster, unprecedented in breadth and scope, has threatened to collapse the American economy and cripple markets worldwide. As in the so-called surprise 9/11 attacks, the economic meltdown is explained as the great machinery of the world's only remaining superpower being left unattended. The institutions and agencies designed to protect against and prevent disasters of immese magnitude have supposedly been staffed by persons asleep at the helm -- with unimaginable consequences.
Again, with any meaningful overview of events during the Bush presidency -- are the Keystone Cops running the show from the marbled halls of our nation's capital -- or are the inmates running the asylum?
At the direction of his criminal co-conspirators and handlers, through a wide array of signing statements and executive orders, Bush has managed to transform the office of the American presidency into a virtual dictatorship. Given the right circumstances, the US president would wield stunning powers that would make any dictator, despot, tzar or king genuinely envious. These extraordinary powers have been created outside the purview of democratic processes. They are permanent, and they carry stunning abilities for executive control over all aspects of American industry, commerce, inventories, communications, transportation, utilities and law enforcement. Martial law, travel restrictions, forced labor projects and US combat troops patroling American cities are only a single "unforeseen disaster" away.
During the Bush years, a wide array of one-time guarantees under the US Constitution have been widely discarded, circumvented, devalued -- all in the name of national security. And power acquired by high government officials and agencies is never easily surrendered and seldom wrested away.
The known causes of the 9/11 attacks and widespread hatred for the United States, especially throughout the Islamic world has not changed, and remains America's dirty little secret that is not open to public discourse. The blind, unconditional US support for the State of Israel continues, both militarily and economically, while the ongoing theft of Palestinian land goes on. Israel has turned the remaining Palestinian lands into the largest open-air prison on earth and the cruelty wrought upon the Palestinian people is profound -- and continues daily.
And Americans support this -- militarily and economically -- year after year. But the reality presented to the American public is carefully managed and disguised. Or simply sidestepped altogether.
But caution is warranted. Discussing such matters, even in a fair-minded, reasonable way is not permitted. There are terms of derision awaiting for those that do. The topic is taboo -- and what better way to frame the discussion than to make it off limits?
With blatant, repeated ineptitude and malfeasence littering his eight-year tenure, certainly, Bush is the most undignified person to have ever occupied the Oval Office in US history. Often buffoonish in public, and unable to string together coherent sentences or to grasp the gravity of his office, Bush has been the focal point of widespread ridicule and disdain. A perverbial laughing stock -- a surreal chapter in American history that most Americans seem anxious to simply forget. The jokes are never-ending but are far from humorous, considering the measureable results of his presidency.
Bush has frequently evoked his Christian values -- his faith in God -- and has said that it was God's will that he be the president of the United States.
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