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