Republicans' paramount interest is for material wealth and the political and military power that will provide it for them and the wealthy interests they serve. They have no genuine loyalty to any country. They use "patriotism" as a club to abduct a populace, poorly informed by the media they control, into serving and dying for them - not for the country, but for THEM and their hoarded billions! They are plutocrats and George W. Bush is their public face.
Bush's fundamental goal is that which has motivated the Republican Party since its inception - plutocracy; i.e. a government where all state decisions are made by and to the advantage of the affluent wealthy class of citizens. In today's world it's almost indistinguishable from fascism (defined by Mussolini as state corporatism) - all decisions are made by and for the benefit of very large corporations and those who control them.
Perpetual war serves three purposes for the plutocracy:
1) It diverts the nations resources away from serving the needs of the large mass of the population and toward satisfying the insatiable appetite the of the corporations who service the incredibly enormous military machine.
2) It expands their control to the rest of the world. The merchants of death behind the war in Iraq (and the coming one in Iran) are amassing hundreds of billions of dollars while murdering 250,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children; a number which makes 2500 American deaths seem as a trifling number.
3) It keeps the people in a constant state of fear and anxiety; a condition which saps their will to resist as their constitutionally guaranteed rights are stripped from them along with their jobs and economic security.
Plutocrats have no religion save that of the worship if wealth, but they vociferously proclaim their piety to appeal to that segment of the electorate who would establish America as a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Indeed wealthy televangelist are more plutocrat than preacher and they were Republicans long before the National party cynically professed Christian fundamentalism as the true faith of America. The likes of Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum are joined at the hip in service to plutocracy and their mutual expressions of devotion to Jesus ring hollow when they call for bombing innocent civilians and torturing prisoners, but their commitment to plutocracy is clearly reflected in their enthusiasm for dismantling Social Security and repealing the estate tax.
George W. Bush is a born plutocrat and like Nero before him a delusional one. He fancies himself as chosen by God to impose his will upon the world. This is clearly demonstrated in this statement he made to a group of Old Order Amish during his visit to Lancaster County, PA on July 9, 2004, "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." His delusional state is his personal misfortune - that so many among us are duped by his grotesque distortions of reality is a cataclysmic tragedy not only for America, but for the whole world.
Republicans usually like to refer themselves as "conservatives" (although the only thing the want to conserve is their own superior material status), but in reality they are plutocrats. John Kenneth Galbraith was really speaking of the plutocrat when he said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
