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George Bush -- The Contemporary Benedict Arnold of the Proto-Fascist Republican Triad

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Virtually all middle class Americans, already frustrated by global capitalism's transfer of the wealth of our society to the financial elite, deeply wanted to believe that George Bush was a strong and compassionate leader who would see us safely through the terrorist threat. Unfortunately, many were seduced to see him in this light by the propaganda machine. Even those of us who early on saw his psycho-spiritual weaknesses as an alcoholic, womanizing draft dodger who suffered a leadership ineptitude that led to the bankruptcy of his three oil companies and near collapse of his family, wanted him to succeed. We hoped that the disastrous reduction of public school, infrastructure, environmental and healthcare support when he was governor of Texas, was an aberration. We prayed that his execution of one hundred fifty Texas men was somehow justified. We wanted to see the compassionate, spiritually minded Christian leader he claimed to be emerge from the macho mechanisms. We wanted him to preserve the best elements of the American way of life and to improve the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, his compassionate conservatism was all smoke and mirrors. Bush almost immediately reverted to the image of toughness that is so much a part of the neo-Confederate or NASCAR mythology that exists across much of the rural south and west, as far north as the Dakotas. It is so virulent in Kansas and Texas and rural Colorado that one native son wrote the book, "What's Wrong With Kansas"? The abusive men in the movie Thelma And Louise, whose lives peaked at this level, would still be supporting George Bush today had they been real persons. Many anxious and frustrated Americans welcomed Bush's aggressive gunfighter rhetoric from the West Texas oil patch. Many still do for they are creatures of tradition and ideology rather than adaptation and intellect. The NASCAR bunch remains willing to sacrifice its young people to the Iraqi War for Bush who claims to be a tough guy when he really is an illusion of a strong and competent leader.

Most of the neo-Confederate are too unsophisticated politically or socially to understand that while all politicians talk tough when campaigning, once they are incumbents they must compromise and form coalitions in order to be effective. A lone wolf is always an outcast in a legislative body. Even the fiercely ideological Ronald Reagan matured beyond his John Wayne style "Make my day" campaign rhetoric and graciously entertained Mr. and Mrs. Gorbachev as house guests in the White House. He made it possible for himself and the Soviet leader to forge the accommodations that ended the Cold War without fighting World War Three. There was no such maturing in George Bush's leadership style for he had internalized the Texas gunfighter mythology as a defense mechanism in order to protect his wounded ego. Because of the many free floating anxieties that long bedeviled him with alcoholism and sexual infidelity, George had overcompensated psycho-spiritually during childhood and created for himself ego defenses that allow him to justify his aggressive hair trigger approach to life. He still has the unconscious fears of an addictive personality, although he no longer drinks. I fear he is what Alcoholics Anonymous counselors call a dry drunk. His character is far more aggressive than his often charming public persona reveals and there are several reasons for his resentment and aggression.

According to the vast majority of psychotherapists, virtually all ideologically reactionary and fundamental true believers are fearful men and women who are never completely comfortable with strangers who have not proven their unconditional support in every circumstance. For example, the enraged men and women who ran amok trying to keep Terry Schaivo alive artificially when the poor shell of a woman was decaying as we watched, are deeply fearful people who were responding to their own anxiety about death. Allowing Terry's husband to disconnect the feeding tube confirmed their hidden fears that dangerous people surround them and could turn against they, themselves. Slightly different were the fears those who broke many state and federal laws to block the return of Emilio Gonzales to his father in Cuba. The anxious upper class Cuban refugees had long been mourning the loss of their personal possessions and property in the old country. Thus, returning six year old Emilio represented the loss of their former prestige and power over the working class of Cubans who remained at home so they resisted making their point. The men and women who spend years of their lives agitating for congressional amendments to block the teaching of evolution and global warming, who agonize for years about homosexuals forming marriage-like unions and joining their congregations, are terrified of changes that their fearful egos are unable to tolerate. The vast majority of true believers, whether in democracies or dictatorships, in Christianity, Islam and Judaism really do feel threatened much of the time even when there is nothing tangible to cause their anxiety attacks. Psychotherapists call this free floating anxiety, and it developed from pain and stress during childhood. Some sufferers believe that their enemies will cripple or slay them -- unless they neutralize or even slay them first. This is why the reactionary men and women feel no more compassion from the slaughter of a hundred thousand Iraqis than their fundamental predecessors did when the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon war was destroying more than two million Vietnamese farmers and fishermen.

Bush responds automatically to challenges by taking numbers and kicking butts -- the ultimate parody of a macho man, verbally if not physically. He simply cannot resist a challenge for that would prove to himself that he is still that little kid that suffered so much pain. You can see the resentment in his face when a reporter dares to doubt him, even when he himself knows he is deceiving the people. His ego is so fragile that he cannot stand being corrected for that was part and parcel of his childhood. If he doesn't strike back, his many enemies shall see through his gunfighter façade. He is very combative -- except of course, when he had an opportunity to transfer to the U S Air Force from the Texas National Guard. When the Air Force needed fighter pilots to fly combat in the Vietnam War, he went like a rabbit, even forcing the Guard to take him from flight status. Nevertheless, he still presents himself as a macho warrior. Of course, he never sees this as a scam, for our ego defenses are almost always invisible to ourselves. He has unconsciously papered over his wounds, has hidden them deep in his ego, which then requires much of his psyche energy to keep them from boiling over for everyone to see. Even after we stuff painful and dangerous elements out of sight and out of mind within the unconscious aspects of our mind, they are never concealed forever and forgotten. Neurotics always use too much of their psychic energy to keep their secrets submerged so they don't boil out to betray us at inappropriate times. A person who stuffs too many unpleasant episodes into his or her unconscious never becomes as intelligent, as creative, and as persuasive or as loving as he or she would have been had they not been emotionally wounded along the way. Of course, ideological true believers need enemies in order to explain to themselves the anxieties that often harass them. They need them as much as emotionally maturing men and women need lovers.

From time to time Bush reveals how weak his tough guy approach really is. He is in essence telling a hundred fifty thousand young Americans -- Lets you and him fight to the death! And why not -- for he and the entire narcissistic triad of politicians, preachers and plutocrats see working class boys and girls who volunteer for military service because they cannot find decent jobs in the global economy, as resources to be consumed to protect their own ideologies. Of course they cannot express their narcissism openly to the country without alienating a great many people so they must find logical sounding reasons to behave as they do. Bush justified his war with the scam about mass weapons and when that story blew apart, seduced patriotic Americans into sacrificing their sons and daughters with their song and dance about the Iraqis lining up to greet us as liberators. Can't you close your eyes and absorb the deep compassion of kindly men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Card, as they agonize through long nights over poor struggling boys and girls from all over America? Now that the second scam has failed, now that it seems few in Iraq are going to desert their tribal traditions, Republican narcissists blame the media for withholding the real story of how our forces are winning the Bush war. Wouldn't you just love to see Cheney or Rumsfeld or DeLay, Frist and Santorum, or even Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell take a long walk through Baghdad some evening, chatting with the Iraqi voters about the effectiveness of their power grid and water and sewage systems?

A vast number reactionary Americans wanted Bush and his band go on the offensive against Arabs, even when he had to break a hundred thousand innocent heads along the way. After all, the Iraqis were Arabs and the rag heads were some of those many enemies that surround radical men and women, evildoers who deserved what they get in any bombing strike. The fearful Congress gave Bush carte blanche to lie and cheat, even with Tony Blair of England, to defy the Constitution, to leave parents grieving the loss of their boys and girls who have been wounded and slain for the benefit of the oil company barons. Many anxious Americans failed to understand that the proto-fascists' loud and long mantra about their personal patriotism, repeated over and over by the ideologues, really is the last refuge of a great many scoundrels. We simply didn't realize that Bush, who had already failed in virtually every activity in his faux macho lifestyle, was not going to mature psycho-spiritually as president. We accepted the ancient myth that electing neurotic incompetents like Polk, Grant and Arthur to the presidency turns them into cool headed statesman. Unfortunately, aggressive quips, contempt for the third class working people of America and a rigid inability to change course when the iceberg appears dead ahead, does not a strong president make. This is why Cheney, Rove and Card, until he got sacked, continue to run the shop while Bush tours the country as a figurehead, appearing only before handpicked true believers, trying to resurrect his approval numbers. His repressed anxieties and the many neurotic defense mechanisms hidden in his soul, were papered over by his spin doctors until the wheels fell off his wagon because of his determination to win his war.

Only recently Bush insisted during a long press conference that his successor in the Oval Office shall have to keep an American occupation force in Iraq long after his own term as president is past. He must, he said, or we would have sacrificed those twenty thousand dead and wounded with so much treasure spent in vain, when trying to bring the blessings of democracy to the tribesmen of Iraq. He sounds very much like a man convicted of slaying his parents and then throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan! Of course, any reactionary replacement president shall automatically oblige him -- a permanent occupation with garrisoned forces ready to strike across the Middle East was the proto-fascist scheme from the beginning. Only the naïve voters failed to see that. But when the worst came to pass, when political disaster loomed, George botched things so badly that a more progressive successor in the White House shall find it difficult to withdraw our troops from danger without giving a great advantage to the Iranian leadership. The proto-fascists of the Bush administration gave their scam about Iraq their best shot by telling every lie they could concoct, by wasting our youngsters and by spinning every blunder so that horse manure smells for a while to the naïve, like attar of roses.

Virtually every assumption the administration made about Iraqi society was based on ignorance and hubris. Our abusers casually unleashed a tidal wave of resentment and rage against America that shall be a generation or more subsiding, even if it doesn't boil over into a war between civilizations that disrupts the flow of oil to the industrial nations and pitches us into a world wide depression. Not since the run-up to our Civil War when egoistic enemies behaved so badly, has the law of unintended consequences been so fraught with peril for America. The neo-cons' failure is obvious as virtually everyone without vested interests in the domination of the Middle East now understands. Many Americans simply do not believe much of anything George Bush now to justify his choices. The neo-con movement has shot its wad, has run its course, has shown itself to be lacking in wisdom, virtues or emotional maturity. Two thirds of Americans and over ninety percent of Europeans now understand that Bush is a poor president who cannot be trusted to do what is best for anyone except the exclusive country club set that is more than willing to spend the lives of any number of poor American kids and Iraqi peasants for their own benefit. Bush's handlers tried to propagandize him into greatness but that illusion has collapsed as completely as when Dorothy chased Toto into the smoke and reflections of the Wizard of Oz's control room within the Emerald City. Fortunately, fewer and fewer Americans are listening to George Bush and his clever, always articulate handlers. Even his steadfast belief in the rightness of his cause, is now being seen as the neurotic stubbornness of a man who has failed at virtually everything he's ever tried to accomplish. He cannot change his course of action about anything without feeling that he has been bested by someone, that his secret weaknesses shall be revealed for all to see. You simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time -- even the dullest true believers eventually recognize who is beating them about the face and head!

Finally, after years of incessant deceptions about everything from mot having made up his mind about an invasion, to weapons of mass destruction -- to a terrorist plot between Saddam and Osama and the justification of tens of thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, on to organizing secret Star Chamber courts and hiding torture centers around the world and using illegal entrapment -- a majority of men and women across all of our civilization have become disenchanted with this American President. We once wasted vast amounts of wealth, almost a quarter million wounded and sixty thousand dead while pretending that South Vietnam was a real country that was vital to American interests. We stayed the bloody course in their civil war and fought wars against our students in our streets, because both Johnson and Nixon were too deeply wounded psycho-spiritually to admit their mistakes and get us out of Indochina. And while Iraq is another situation, this is looking more and more like another civil war between opposing tribes. Seemingly, during every generation, the American financial aristocracy boils over in greed and hubris enough to start another war for our poor and middle class sons and daughters to bleed die in, while their own children go to graduate school and reap massive financial benefits. While Bush was playing with aircraft as a weekend warrior, Cheney was getting six draft deferments that kept him far danger. We let them get away with it while buying politicians and preachers and by propagandizing naïve Americans into pulling their chestnuts from the fires of war by appealing to our patriotism.

One major ego defense mechanism appears in the way that Bush insists he doesn't care what anyone feels about the state of his presidency. If he is sincere about that, if he really doesn't care, he is the first politician in the last five hundred years who didn't agonize after losing control of his schemes. No emotionally healthy person fails to care what others think of he himself. Because we all need praise and rewards rather than criticism and punishment, only persons who have been criticized and abused repeatedly in childhood build up so much emotional scar tissue that they lose the capacity to care. As J R R Tolkien demonstrated in his massive Lord Of The Rings saga, persons who spend their entire lives grubbing for wealth and power, make so many selfish compromises that they lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. This ego distortion comes from suffering such emotional pain that one concludes he or she is surrounded by enemies who don't deserve a second thought, that most people are idiots who cannot understand the inner life of such a significant person as I am. It is a sad state of affairs in any neurotic person's soul when he or she needs to rationalize defeat, must pretend that everyone but I myself alone is out of step. George grew up in an elite family that expected excellence in all things -- an excellence that George simply could not deliver to his parents and teachers because of his dyslexia. Bush developed both a hair trigger response to correction because he faced so much criticism as a learning disabled child -- and an ability to hide painful events in his unconscious. Now, after a half century of practice, he must be hit in the head with an ax handle to make him respond to anyone who tries to pry him out of his ego's comfort zone. This stubborn defense mechanism, which many people initially confused with strength of character, comes from his painful childhood when he was under severe pressure because of his dyslexia.

He had to have felt incompetent and inept when he couldn't keep up in school, although he was as intelligent as most of the kids. His difficulty with spoken language and his difficulty when reading, according to Bush biographers, triggered enormous pressures from his parents who wanted a son worthy of the honored family name. I was the Director of a learning and learning disabilities clinic in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin and I never examined a dyslexic child that did not suffer a severe psychological overlay because of this failure to master written and spoken language. Symptoms vary but one of the most common ego wounds is a failure to adapt when one's life strategy fails. One definition of neuroticism includes making the same unsuccessful response to a problem, never changing anything, although expecting a more satisfying result the next time through. I can hear John Wayne's movie voice echoing in George Bush's head. "Never apologize Mister. It is a sign of weakness!" Many children adopt various kinds of self-defeating techniques when under emotional pressure. Some lock themselves in an emotional prison with defense mechanisms of their own making for the rest of their lives. They seldom realize their immature attempts to avoid ego pain always cause more problems than they solve. Most fearful neurotic sufferers need psychotherapy or a spiritual restoration in order to recover. And of course, a macho west Texas gunslinger must never become introspective and cannot apologize, for that would confirm the weaknesses he has tried all his life to conceal. And he can trust only those hirelings who have proven themselves to be supportive regardless of his blunders, which is why he has replace only Card from his exhausted and faltering staff. He feels more comfortable with trusted blunderers rather than with brilliant newcomers and everything George does is related in some way to staying sober and in his comfort zone.

It seems obvious to me that Bush is limited by a dyslexic single focus world view that protects him from confusion and self-doubt by playing all of life's tunes on the one string of his intellectual instrument. The reason why he has never read through a single book since leaving college is a common one to the learning disabled. It comes from his cognitive inability to organize the material intellectually. Because George cannot manage ambiguous issues that require sophisticated logic in order to understand them, he has selected two or three life themes and now plays them so incessantly that naive people like the NASCAR bunch and even grieving parents, who desperately seek some justification for the death or maiming of their children in a vicious war, eventually accept them as true. Advertising psychologists report that any message heard more than ten or twelve times becomes embedded in the listeners mind and is accepted as the truth regardless of how absurd. This is why George used the words terrorism and terrorists almost twenty times in a recent speech. It is the only effective tune in his repertory and he must play it or stay mute.

His macho defenses, combined with his current political, financial and military power, has led Bush to make more and more disastrous choices. Half a dozen former assistants, associates and cabinet members have complained how remarkably passive and uncurious George is during his meetings. Only recently he sat through a long briefing on the rebuilding of New Orleans without asking a single question. I suspect he knows that entering into a give and take dialogue about important issues would reveal the poverty of his intellect, his inability to wrap his mind around complex issues. Better to be silent and be thought a dunce than to speak out and remove all doubt about it! Especially if you already know all the satisfactory answers. Bush simplistically hears what he expects to hear about virtually all issues, runs it thorough his reactionary political and fundamental religious mind set and then coughs out an automatic decision that reflects his limited flexibility. I'm confident that the pandering to his one string instrument by the ambitious members of his staff and cabinet is constant. To George, pensive or deliberate men appear weak and incompetent. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who literally recreated his own body in order to feel significance and powerful, calls logical thinkers girly men. Virtually every macho man intuitively feels that the world is a dangerous place in which dominance, aggression and retribution is far more valuable than collegiality, peacekeeping and forgiveness. They learn this mode of life early in a painful childhood or adolescence.

Bush and other proto-fascist handlers fear and hate a world that is filled with shades of gray -- because they think in stark black and white values in a dangerous world filled with enemies. George cannot allow himself to be distracted by nuances. For example, his insistence that the fundamental Islamic clergy and laity of Iraq would welcome an invading infidel army as liberators, betrayed his profound cultural ignorance about the billion or so Muslims he challenged to -- Bring it on. That aggressive macho attitude seems to have become dominant in his life during junior high but his dissatisfaction had to have developed earlier than that. Unfortunately, President Bush has reached a level of governance where everything is incredibly complex because of all those nuances he rejects. There is virtually nothing a president can do to serve one segment of humanity that doesn't frustrate another group or two. For example, in order to serve his aristocratic few well, he is more than willing to strip almost everything good from Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. He will rationalize destroying labor unions that created the middle class so as to please Chamber of Commerce members and end Roe vs. Wade freedom of choice to please his anti-choice neo-Confederate base. The windfall gasoline profits his war in Iraq created for the oil companies was ripped from the American people through higher fuel and heating costs. He rationalizes these choices because either unconsciously or perhaps consciously, the financial aristocracy really does consider itself more patriotic and more spiritual than the insignificant rank and file people they use and discard to create more wealth for they, themselves.

For example, at one of the Texas nominating conventions that Bush and his family attended, a large section of carefully coifed, designer clad and heavily bejeweled proto-fascist Republican women stood and chanted: We are the true Americans -- We are the real Christians. The women chanted for ten minutes or so as the Bush contingent cheered them and the frightening thing is that aristocratic women and men really believe such drivel and make wicked choices that reflect their scorn of everyone outside their elite country clubs and guarded and gated multimillion dollar mansions. George Bush apparently handles the inevitable ambiguities of life by resolving every problem with ideological solutions that benefit most his autocratic contributors and their vassals. I doubt he has ever asked Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove or Dick Cheney the thoughtful question posed regularly by effective leaders -- What could go wrong if I accept the course of action you are recommending? Or, more specifically, is there any way our military could still be bogged down in Iraq and I myself suffering a thirty-six percent approval rating three years after we defeated Saddam's forces? There are enough major reasons that George Bush should be sacked.

STARTING THE MIDDLE EASTERN WAR
DEVOURING OUR MILITARY FORCES
CREATING THE NATIONAL DEFICIT
WEAKENING THE MIDDLE CLASS
RAVISHING THE ENVIRONMENT
DESTROYING DEMOCRACY
BRIBING THE CONGRESS
LYING TO THE PEOPLE

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JARD DeVILLE is the author, founder and co-owner with, Dee DeVille, of the DeVILLE LOGOTHERAPY LEARNING CENTER & SPEAKER SERVICES and The FULFILLMENT FORM. The FORUM is the publisher and purveyor of fine e-books and courses. He has published more (more...)
 
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