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People of conscience who believe in the letter and spirit of the law would have blanched at this kind of information and more that was suppressed when George Bush was a presidential candidate in 2000. It was no commonplace history of a young man sowing his wild oats or going through his rites of passage. This is a man whom former Texas Governor Ann Richards once aptly described as "someone born on third base (thinking) he hit a triple." It also reveals a man who thinks he has a right to use and abuse anyone for his own amusement or self-interest. Had the voters known any of this, at the least it would have given them pause about whether this was the kind of man they wanted as chief executive, even though there's no guarantee anyone else would have been much different in office. As things turned out, it didn't matter once five arrogant High Court justices decided their votes counted more than all of ours. They wanted a Republican president and deprived Al Gore of the office he won. The rest of us lost out along with him because of their judicial annulment of our most fundamental democratic right without which there's no democracy. We've been on the road to hell ever since.Thorough investigative reporting proved how corrupted the electoral process was in 2000 because of mass-disenfranchisement of millions of eligible voters. It got worse in 2004 and may be off the charts in November and 2008 confounding the polls and pundits now predicting the Democrats will win back one or both houses of Congress. They'll be hard-pressed to do it now that electronic voting machines run by large corporations control over 80% of the total vote. We know these machines can be easily manipulated in secret assuring the companies controlling them get enough of the candidates they favor elected ending any pretense there can ever again be a free and fair election with them in charge of the process. It's another reason why half the still-enfranchised public or less never shows up at the polls. Why bother if your choice goes by voting machine magic to the other candidate, is never counted or doesn't matter anyway because the only choice is what Ralph Nader calls "the evil of two lessers." It's a system of rule in a de facto one party state author and social critic Gore Vidal calls the "Property party" with two right wings: Republicans and Democrats in a plutocracy. Others call it fascism, but by any definition, it's the tyranny of capital enforced by storm trooper brutality and military tribunal justice spelling the end of a democratic republic.
We see the results today in the kinds of people serving in high office and the harm their malice, greed and lust for power cause. They shamelessly used the controversial event on 9/11 as a launching platform to go to war with two non-aggressive states to control them for political and economic gain and to serve the interests of our joined-at-the-hip Middle East partner. It didn't matter that neither country threatened us or any of their neighbors. The Bush administration invented lies that they did to justify a messianic mission of madness, planned months earlier, starting in the Middle East and Central Asia, and continuing until its goal of full spectrum dominance is achieved over all land, sea, air, outer space and information.
Our Middle East Partner in Imperial Madness
Allied with us in our criminal mission of madness is a willing and eager partner already suggested. It's the tiny state of Israel that has the power and influence of a giant because we made it one. We fund and arm it lavishly and support its equally mad imperial mission to reign unchallenged over its part of the world in partnership with us. We co-authored and funded its genocidal wars of exploitation and annexation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) for nearly six decades and its similar adventures against its northern Lebanese neighbor for the past 40 of them culminating with its five week summer blitzkrieg criminal assault laying waste to the whole country and making this act of infamy a nominee for the crime of the century for the amount of devastation and human misery it caused in so short a time.
The Shameless Neocon Bush Administration Legacy
No other US administration in history can match the appalling six year record of the Bush neocons. The harm they've done and the price free people are paying for it is incalculable. They brazenly destroyed two defenseless countries in the name of "liberation," killed many hundreds of thousands of their people bringing them the "benefits" of "western civilization," and immiserated milllions more dooming them to suffer and die daily in great numbers out of sight and out of mind. They also trashed sacred constitutional and international laws and norms doing it, institutionalized the use of mass-imprisonment, torture and other dehumanizing and degrading barbaric acts to make it work, have a ready set of new targets in their queue and created a proto-fascist national security police state at home tolerating no dissent nor any protection from the sacred constitutional rights of habeas and due process now effectively annulled.
People of conscience demanding justice and accountability are outraged that officials responsible for this agenda are allowed to get away with it and may never have to answer for their crimes in a court of law. But that doesn't mean they've gone unnoticed or unaddressed. The Bush administration has now become the first one in US history to be charged with war crimes by the International Committee of the Red Cross and the only other one the ICRC ever charged besides Nazi Germany. Those named culpable are George Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, top military commanders and many members of Congress. Their crimes match the worst of those in the Hitler regime put in the Nuremberg Tribunal dock to stand trial. The ones found guilty there of the "supreme international crime" of illegal aggression were hanged while others of lesser culpability were sentenced to appropriate prison terms for lengths of time commensurate with their crimes. In a world not ruled by victor's justice, George Bush and his conspiratorial allies would be held just as accountable and made to face the same judgment at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague as the worst of the Nazi rogues did at Nuremberg.
The threat of that happening after he leaves office may be why it's been reported George Bush bought a 98,842 acre farm in Paraguay to go along with the 173,000 acres his father already owns there. Both properties border Bolivia and Brazil and comprise in total an astonishing 2.7% of the whole country. Are they considering buying a controlling interest in it? It's not known what the Bush family has in mind there, but it is known Paraguay has no laws criminalizing money-laundering, anti-terrorism or terrorist financing even though it does have an extradition treaty with the US if it ever dared using it for the Bushes.
George Bush may have gotten advice to seek a safe haven because he and his cohorts have a lot to answer the US public and world community for including having financed their Orwellian agenda on the back of a growing mountain of unrepayable debt that's causing some worried analysts to believe they've helped bankrupt the nation, an eventual fiscal calamity is unavoidable, and the end result will be what most people believe is unthinkable - that the richest of all nations will eventually default on its sovereign debt, entitlements millions are counting on and think are safe, and all other financial obligations because either there won't be enough resources left to pay for them or we'll just have near-worthless fiat currency no one any longer wants.
This is the specter of a potential future elephant in the room calamity few in high places will admit is there. Nor is there much talk that it was engineered by successive administrations, a complicit Congress and a friendly private for-profit Federal Reserve (owned and controlled by the big banks and Wall Street giants) always willing to print up all the ready cash needed to keep the party going. As long as it can get away with it, it knows it has to (as it's doing now) because once it stops the good times are over, and so is freewheeling neocon imperialism. While it lasts though, the high-roller players are benefitting at the public's expense from a dollar-financed Ponzi scheme using the world's dominant reserve currency debt to advance the interests of capital and build a global US empire to secure it. The ugly scheme has gone on unchecked for decades, it accelerated during the Reagan years and went into overdrive under the Bush neocons and their agenda of endless imperial wars for world dominance that need lots of cash and mountains of debt to create it.
Today we have their legacy, and we're governed recklessly by an authoritarian band of marauders with delusions of grandeur for their kind of brave new world order that threatens all humanity. It's a vision of corporatism enforced with unchallengeable military might and made possible by the magic of printing press debt monetization other central banks have to go along with. They haven't much choice as they're tied to the majority of America's industrial base operating in their countries, but more importantly, they're entrapped in a US-controlled dollarized world where over half their foreign reserves collectively are now in the US currency, China alone holding $1 trillion of them. All the players need to keep the scheme going like a worldwide fiscal game of musical chairs played on the edge of a cliff. They can't let the music stop even though they know one day it will, and then they'll face the same fate as the Mother Goose character Humpty Dumpty. Herb Stein, Richard Nixon's chief economic advisor, knew all about the nursery rhyme symbolism. He explained it once when he said: "Things that can't go on forever, don't." He omitted the part about what happens next, but he understood the penalty for excess is high, painful, inevitable and at that point there's nothing "All the king's horses and all the king's men" can do about it.
This is the legacy of a generation of greed capped by the George Bush neocon presidency that will go down in history as a blight on humanity the likes of which may end up exceeding anything preceding it anywhere - if we survive to reflect on it. Call this era under the Bush neocons The Age of Perversion in contrast to an earlier Age of Enlightenment that helped inspire our liberating revolutionary spirit creating the glorious experiment of a democracy never before tried outside of the imperfect earlier version of it for a few decades in ancient Athens.
Theirs ended as ours is doing now, and many share the blame besides a rogue administration, Congress and courts. As much fault lies with the dominant interests in corporate boardrooms without whose complicity none of this would be tolerated, the powerful Jewish Lobby Zionists and their Christian fundamentalist/Zionist allies with enormous influence on policy, and those in academia and the major media who sold their souls pledging allegiance to a criminal enterprise posing as a legitimate government. They're all conspiratorially allied in its messianic mission of madness for the benefits they get at the expense of the public welfare and the ultimate price that one day will have to be paid for their transgressions.
Also blame the many millions of ordinary people so pre-occupied in their daily lives they took the word of a sadist and inveterate liar making empty promises to combat terror threats that don't exist while claiming to care about the democratic social equity and justice-for-all principles he, the Congress, courts and other dominant interests don't give a damn about.
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