We do know that putting himself together in an effective way took this son of George H.W. and Barbara Bush a very long time""a time marked by failure covered over by bravado and anaesthetized by alcohol.
And we can see still in his body -in his posturing like some sort of gunslinger, arms out from his side; in his swagger and strut; in the unnatural puffing out of the chest""powerful signs that this is a man who really does not know who he is. He seems constantly seeking the pose of the man in the white hat, an imitation of the heroes of movie westerns.
The line between "really doesn't know" and "doesn't want to know" is hard to draw in human affairs, just like the line between deception and self-deception.
Bush's Brain
author James Moore says about the Bush-Rove partnership:
"The President is oblivious, and chooses to stay oblivious, to the things that Karl does, and the contradictions about morality that Karl does. The whole concept, and it works in all of his campaigns, is the candidate or the officeholder takes the high road -- talks policy, talks moral clarity, and honor, and principle -- while the operative does all the dirty work down in the ditch, and splashes the mud, and spreads the scurrilous smears and rumors and whisper campaigns that have the desired political effect to keep the candidate elected."Whatever it is that the president knows about what he's doing, and whatever are the moral lies with which he deceives himself, right now in America the buck stops with a man who talks about restoring integrity to the Oval Office while the "architect" he hires is a specialist in perpetrating moral fraud.
He's someone who talks about how we're fighting for "Freedom," but arranges political events from which people wearing T-shirts favoring his opponent are excluded, and shows nothing but indifference while Russia lapses back into dictatorship.
He parades his devotion to a culture of life, but sows the seeds of death at home, around the world, and in the biosphere.
He talks about "compassion" but is able to mock the pleas for mercy he rejected from the woman -born again, like himself""whom he'd put to death in Texas.
He arranges photo ops with his friendly arm around some black child or another, but fights hardest for policies that transfer wealth from those who have less to those who have most.
He campaigned saying that the United States should be a "humble" nation, but is now reviled around the world as an arrogant bully.
In this dangerous period of the moral lie, regrettably, this list of discrepancy between the saying and the doing could be expanded almost indefinitely.
In another time of dangerous hypocrisy in the White House, an American Attorney General said, memorably: "You will be better advised to watch what we do instead of what we say."
But for evil to gain such a strong foothold in America, it would have to be just through such moral hypocrisy and falsehood as this. These rulers could not shoot their way into the White House. They had to sell themselves to a willing public.
And people do not knowingly give power to those who care only about power. People do not entrust their destiny to rulers who inhabit a world where the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. People do not want a leader who is not really with them, but whose true view of them is that they are on the other, wrong side of his castle's battlements.
When evil is combined with power, it spreads its ways. The amoral world such rulers inhabit becomes the world we are all compelled to inhabit. Thus have these rulers moved the world back toward the horrors of "might makes right" in the international system. Thus have they degraded the American social order toward a world where the essence of society is "the war of all against all," and aggrandizement is the only real value.
These are the stakes when it comes to awakening our countrymen to the moral fraud that has been perpetrated upon this nation.
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