The George Bush Presidency has failed...with his approval rating in the cellar, wavering around thirty-six points, a great many Americans evidently agree with me. As President Lincoln reputedly said; “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
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For a hundred fifty years we have known that President James Polk, who bumbled through the war with Mexico during the mid 1840s, was arguably the most inept chief executive ever to hold the highest national office in Washington. Polk was a worse president than Ulysses Grant who tried to deal with the Congress as he had dominated his Civil War subordinates. Polk may even have made as many mistakes as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon combined, when they were destroying a generation’s faith in American institutions with their blatant dishonesty during the Vietnam War. President Polk even out-fumbled Jimmy Carter who ran an inept administration that accepted the self-serving recommendations of whom ever last advised him. But, after all of that is said and done, I believe that James Polk was a bush league bumbler when compared to the rigid ideological true believer now occupying the White House.
I see George Bush as a dangerous proto-fascist who endorses every scam his handlers concoct to profit the elite members of his wealthy class who are making the selfish decisions that are swiftly turning the American democracy into a virtual dictatorship.
The current outbreak of global capitalism is but one scam of the financial aristocracy. You can count on it -- the ruthless neo-cons or proto-fascists now in control of the White House, the Senate, House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court, are working night and day to propagandize us into meek acquiescence as they destroy our American Republic. No more financial aristocrats than can be carried aboard a single Boeing 747, have cornered over ninety percent of all American wealth. They are the people who are casting America on the scrap heap of history by literally buying our congressional and presidential elections. They don’t even need a Latin American style military coup when they can use a tiny fraction of their enormous wealth to corrupt the souls of the few hundred politicians who do their bidding. The narcissistic cabal is doing everything possible to propagandize naïve Americans into surrendering our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for their own benefit. Their major modus operandi is to frighten naïve persons into seeing danger on every hand. The vast majority of neurotic and psychopathic users and abusers of humankind cannot help themselves. Their souls are beset by gnawing anxieties. As a result of severe childhood traumas or possibly some genetic flaws, they feel themselves under constant attack by dangerous enemies such as populist politicians, liberal professors, psychologists, and public broadcasting executives who expose their scams in order to present a balanced view of the world. The abusers want you to accept their imaginary enemies as real and to believe that they alone can protect you and your family from them. The narcissistic triad of religious fundamentalists, political reactionaries and manipulative financial aristocrats use the world's most potent propaganda machine to invent enemies and to persuade you to hate them, even when none exist.
For example, the entire flap about stem cell research, contracts for gay lovers, evolutionary science and the assault on each couple’s right to plan and space their children, is a propaganda ploy used by the narcissistic triad to confuse people about maintaining an affluent middle class in a viable democracy. Every medieval tyrant worth his salt understood that by keeping his peasants quarreling among themselves, they couldn't unite to dethrone him. Neurotic or psychopathic power players need enemies as much as normal men and women need lovers. They seek villains to blame for their constant anxiety, to justify to themselves the roiling turmoil that infects their souls, that makes them eager to dominate and pillage any and all less powerful persons so they can feel good about themselves. Without enemies to explain away their anxieties and hostilities, they are unable to blame anyone but themselves for the feelings of ineptness and vulnerability that have roiled around in the unconscious aspects of troubled souls since childhood. Of course you can see how driven most selfish men and women are in the old quip -- Anyone can become very rich. You need only to think about nothing except making money and to love no one who doesn't make money for you for the next thirty years. Their ceaseless scramble for more and more power, possessions, prestige and pleasure than any person can use, is the ultimate Freudian defense mechanism of neurotic and psychopathic men and women.
Reactionary people as you can see by observing some persons I believe to be angry haters, ruthless abusers and true believers like Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Tom Delay, Richard Cheney, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Osama bin Laudin, Pat Buchannan and many others who grub for wealth or power, simply cannot relax and live at peace. They are driven ideologically, as a means of ego protection, to force everyone else to hate as they hate, to believe as they believe and especially to vote as they vote. True believers almost always remain angry and on the offensive because their hidden turmoil drives them on and on to dominate all other person and situation. They crave wealth and power enough so no one in their dangerous world filled with enemies can ever abuse and humiliate them again. And because their greedy attitudes and wicked activities give them times of relief, anyone who opposes them is converted into an enemy who deserve to be defeated or even destroyed. And they will move heaven and earth to persuade you to send your kids to bleed and die in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Haiti, Libya, Afghanistan, Grenada, Iraq twice and several other wars so they can find some peace of mind that comes from dominating others into fighting their internal wars.
It seems obvious to me that George W. Bush has nudged James Polk out of the running as the most inept, most dangerous president in the history of the American Republic. I believe that he grew up in this category of users and abusers. And with his approval rating in the cellar, wavering around thirty-six points, a great many Americans evidently agree with me. As President Lincoln reputedly said; “You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” We finally seem to have become be aware of what this man and his handlers are costing our country. Apparently the only men and women who still think George Bush a great leader of the American Republic are like the carefully coifed and bejeweled women delegates at a recent Texas Republican convention who chanted -- We are the true Americans -- we are the true Christians. These are some of the narcissistic abusers in fundamental worship, reactionary politics and manipulative finance who share Bush's egoistic craving for wealth and the power it produces. These are ruthless power players who see the American people as serfs who deserve to serve the aristocracy for a pittance. Not only has Bush and his ruthless reactionary cabinet and staff savaged the Constitution and the Bill of Rights by making choices that destroying middle class democracy and replacing it with a fascistic government by and for his elite class, he has blundered into a series of very dangerous unintended consequences in the Middle East.
We, the sincere and honest men and women of America who work hard and follow the rules and pay our taxes, have been abused and made vulnerable by the many wannabe stooges of the narcissistic abusers who ignore the due processes of law on which our Republic is based. Abusers arrest and imprison American citizens without a shred of legitimate evidence. Just recently the American government was forced to pay a Muslim American a hundred thousand dollar settlement because the FBI kept him imprisoned and suffering mental and physical abuse in a maximum security facility -- for a year after they knew he was innocent of any connection with El Queida terrorists. The proto-fascists of this administration have initiated secret Star Chamber type hearings where the accused are denied a legal defense or even allowed access to the charges against them. At one recent Quaker discussion of the administration's Middle East disaster, three of the five persons present were undercover agents who kept urging the two straight men to violate some law so they could arrest them. Entrapment of Americans has become a major modus operandi of this administration.
This president, whom I feel has been inept and insecure emotionally from childhood, is apparently consumed by many hidden anxieties. He was a poor student who had been criticized to the point of emotional abuse by a deeply disappointed mother, a pretty boy betrayer of naive girls attracted to his wealth, a mediocre National Guardsman kept out of danger by a powerful father who wanted another boy to go into Vietnam in his place and a three time business failure who was finally bailed out with an outright gift by his parent's political allies.
Bush must recognize at some level of consciousness, had he not been a Walker/Bush son, he would now be selling used cars or tending bar in some road house in Midland, Texas. His aristocratic name was his only stock in trade, his passport into the country club world of wealth and prestige. He never once faced up to a serious challenge and resolved it as a strong person does to win his own spurs. He never found an area of life where he knew he was superior, where he could shine. And he still hasn't, even after his excursion into politics. His governorship of Texas as well as the presidency of the United States was purchased for him by the oil barons of Texas and rubberstamped by the Supreme Court when he lost the popular vote. His governorship of Texas culminated in the near collapse of public education, the safety network for poor people and the destruction of many state highways as he slashed taxes for his class of aristocrats. Even his presidency is the product of the most vile, most dishonest propaganda attack possible on every opponent. George Bush who hid in the National Guard and Dick Cheney who sat out the war with college deferments during the Vietnam War -- did everything possible to destroy the reputations of John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry, all of whom bled for America while they were boozing and fornicating their way through the Indochina debacle. I believe that virtually everything Bush believes and does is ideological in nature, because he is incapable of maturing beyond the greedy, elitist values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and choices the Texas style true believers live by.
Almost every narcissistic aristocrat understands he or she is not especially loved by the peasants. Uneasy lies the head which wears the crown -- is more than a cliché. Most honest people still believe that: Behind every great fortune is concealed an enormous crime. Bush authorizes illegal surveillance with secret wiretapping, encourages the use of torture by surrogate nations like Poland, Pakistan and Egypt and tolerates the brutal humiliation of hundreds or thousands of innocent suspects. The Bush administration has punished a few low level grunts with years in prison while carefully protecting the officers who gave the orders to abuse the prisoners in ways that are certain to create tremendous anti-American resistance recruit many new terrorists. Abu Ghraib Prison was just the tip of the iceberg and every enraged father, brother or cousin in the Middle East hates what they see as the administration's hypocrisy. And while most Saudis, Iranians, Egyptians and Iraqis for years excused the American people for their governmental excesses, they now tell one another there are no longer any innocent Americans. Many enraged Middle Eastern people have come to blame we ordinary citizens for repeatedly electing American politicians who finance, arm and train the brutal forces of their own murderous rulers. Of course, our proto-fascists remain so anxious and so narcissistic that they still insist they can defeat a billion resentful Muslims with military might. They press their ideological agendas under the pretense of protecting America from terrorism. Fear always sells better than hope to frightened voters. Had the 9/11 attacks been blocked, the always fearful reactionaries would created another enemy and propagandized us into letting people like Cheney, Frist, DeLay, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Alioto and others, whom I believe to be proto-fascists, to pursue their own selfish ends. I might accept their claim to be protecting the nation, were they not creating ten new terrorists for every soldier of the night they stop.
I’m convinced that this is how the Bush neo-conservative, anti-middle class, aristocratic class war works. George Bush seems determined to have no one serve in his administration that is more intelligent, more truthful or more psychospiritually mature than he himself. His modus operandi appears to be:
If you cannot dazzle the American people with your brilliance, you can always blind them with your bull-bleep.
But then, what more than spin, spin, spin and deceive, deceive, deceive -- can be expected from the narcissistic triad of spiritually bankrupt fundamental clergy, primitive reactionary politicians and selfish financial manipulators, who created an illusion of their patriotism through the world’s most potent propaganda machine. The proto-fascists have created a chimera of responsible patriotism that has nothing to do with their careful makeover of the intellectually, spiritually and psychologically challenged George Bush. On the advice of his guru Karl Rove, he even professed to have been born again spiritually, for such God speak sells well in Texas and most other Red States.
Reactionaries and fundamentalists have always wanted their preachers dramatic and their politicians religious. When Episcopal Bishop Leonidas Polk concluded his last sermon in his cathedral, he dramatically threw his robes open to reveal himself clad in the gold encrusted uniform of a Confederate major general on his way to war. His large congregation of slave owners gave him a standing ovation. Professing Christ sells so well to racist, sexist and anti-science true believers that it twice got Bush into the White House. However, if he did trust and follow Jesus, he soon detoured into the closest posh country club. Consider when the Texas oil barons first offered him support if he's run for the governorship of Texas Bush asked Rove; “How do I talk to poor people? I’ve never met one in my life?” Obviously he never rang any Christmas bells for the Salvation Army, served meals in a homeless shelter or tutored struggling students, before it became politically expedient to appear to the voters as a sincere compassionate conservative. I believe his aristocratic agenda is the selfish kind that caused the historic Jesus to say: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Rove tutored Bush in enough Texas God-Speak to pass as an evangelical. Of course, his rebirth of compassionate Christian values and choices very conveniently coincided with his entry into politics when a major overhaul of this womanizing and alcoholic failure was needed. It is no wonder more and more Methodists resent him claiming membership in their denomination. One pastor recently said, “I wish he would stop professing to be one of us -- he’s giving our denomination a bad name.”
I think that underneath his clever good-old-boy makeover, there still lurks the reactionary womanizing alcoholic. It took a decade of propaganda and several fortunes to turn that frustrated frog into the illusion of a patriotic American -- and now it has become painfully obvious to me and many of the American people that the spiritual rebirth engineered by his consultants, has failed miserably. I believe he has retained his aristocratic ideologies through which he accepts the collapse of the American middle class and the establishment of one man rule. Of course, George W. Bush now has a massive military establishment, a nuclear arsenal and a powerful propaganda machine to bolster his fragile self-esteem in any way he pleases, should his macho delusions crumble and he start drinking again. A feckless Congress, with its dismal mid-twenties approval rating by the American people, has opted out of responsible governance and shrugged; “You the man -- the main man -- Do what you think best and we shall rubber stamp your agendas.” His pretensions of leading a strong Jeffersonian democracy fail at this point:
Ideological rigidity, which can pass as strength in an era of relentless change, is one sure sign of proto-fascistic values and attitudes. One must adapt with new circumstances or fail miserably but Bush has so rigid a mindset that he cannot abandon his Texas Country club mindset to govern well.
A belated discovery of patriotism is the last refuge of a political scoundrel. When all else fails, terrify naïve people by creating enemies you alone can defeat. Bush has parlayed this fear to present himself to true believers as a great wartime leader.
The religious, political and financial aristocracy believes it knows best what the commoners need. They feel their own wealth and power proves that God blesses and trusts them most. Therefore the little people should shut up and work hard for a pittance and soldier when needed and vote as they are told by their betters.
A. THE BUSH PROTO-FASCISTS WIN WIDESPREAD ACCEPTANCE BY MAKING PROMISES WE THE PEOPLE WANT ENACTED AND THEN BETRAY US BY DEALING FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE DECK WHEY WE STOP WATCHING THEIR HANDS.
The George Bush, aristocratic way to the collapse of democracy is to:
Promise to protect the American people from terrorism but betray every Constitutional guarantee that blocks a yearning for dictatorial powers to serve his wealthy class.
Promise compassionate conservative values and then betray every family, education, health, and veterans program by appointing feckless pawns like Michael Brown to gut them.
Promise to honor the servicemen who are sent in harms way and then betray veterans like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry who bled for America while Bush played soldier.
Promise to be a national healer and then rule aggressively as the most divisive president since Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.
Promise to be financially prudent and then turn the Clinton surplus into a ticking time bomb set by greedy aristocrats to starve all social programs except for high end tax breaks.
Promise to improve Social Security and Medicare and then betray millions of Americans without retirement and health plans in order to enrich HMO and pharmaceutical companies.
Promise to assign great American leaders to improve our crucial agencies and the Justice Department and then rely on wannabe puppets such as Scooter Libby, Michael Brown and Alberto Gonzales.
B. WE NOW HAVE MANY REASONS TO DOUBT THAT AMERICA CAN ABSORB THE PROTO-FACISTIC SCAMS AND SURVIVE AS THE GREAT AMERICAN REPUBLIC WE HAVE KNOWN, LOVED AND SERVED.
Despite all the loud denials, the disaster now boiling over in Iraq has always been about oil. The young Americans dying there are being sacrificed for the benefits of America's elite who control ninety percent of our wealth.
In his scheme to gain direct access to Middle Eastern oil for American petroleum companies through building military bases in Iraq, the inept and aggressive Bush propagandized the American people into endorsing the war to capture terrorist weapons of mass destruction. The Bush people knew that they couldn’t persuade American parents to sacrifice their youngsters for the greater good of Texas oil barons. However, they could and did sell their invasion scheme by claiming Iraq was preparing a more deadly terrorist strike against America than the 9/11 attack. This claim was a deliberate misuse of intelligence information that was cherry picked and shaped to persuade the naïve of the nation to trot along on the heels of the pied piper from the Texas Oil Patch. Only after Saddam’s mass weapons were revealed to exist only in the scheming minds of the Bush puppets, did the proto-fascists begin pretending that America was liberating Iraq to deliver a grateful people from Saddam’s evil dictatorship. Of course, the American government had long supported Saddam financially and with intelligence and weapons during his nine years of war against Iran. It was only after he was no longer useful to the power players of Washington that he was dropped like a sick skunk. The manipulators switched gears as gracefully as possible, but can you really persuade yourself that play-boy George W. Bush, quick-draw Richard Cheney, bully-boy Donald Rumsfeld and torture specialist Alberto Gonzales ever gave one hoot in hell about bringing democracy to the unwashed and ragged Iraqi masses? These proto-fascists don’t even want a republic form of government in America, unless they own the politicians body and soul. Their only interest in democratic governance is maintaining the total freedom of the financial aristocrats to profit through laissez faire capitalism. The despised and long abused peasants of Iraq quickly saw the dishonest gap between Bush’s rhetoric about democracy and their own treatment by the American pro-counsel Paul Zimmer. The administration eventually set up an election in Iraq to stave off disaster and to squelch criticism at home but tried very hard to make it meet their own agenda. As they should have expected, the garlands from the masses soon became roadside bombs and fire fights with some twelve thousand American kids killed or wounded. Bush didn't even suspect when he declared "Mission Accomplished!" that the real war was just beginning.
Bush and his narcissistic power players blundered blindly into a hotbed of tribal and religious conflicts and hatreds with not a clue about the cultural traditions and religious beliefs of the Arabic people. They couldn’t imagine that the masses of tribal Iraqis are as committed to Islamic beliefs as Manhattan bankers are to profits. The poor and often abused Arabic people find little relief in consumption, no release in entertainment and have no time for athletics, not on the purchasing power of a meager annual income. Their only support comes from friends and family members with whom they meet or worship at the local mosque. Blood lines really mean something important in Arabic lands. Life truly is miserable through the region for most people and only their faith in God keeps life reasonably endurable. Islam -- God’s will, is a crucial important concept. And yet, when the Bush administration recently sponsored a symposium about peacemaking in Iraq, the two or three members who tried to discuss the role of Islam in the nation’s recovery were repeatedly brushed aside by the moderator. The chairman was determined to hammer into place a secular Western solution whether it fit or not.
When Plan A about Saddam’s mass weapons was exposed as a fraud, Plan B was hurriedly concocted and sold to naïve Americans, who after 9/11 anxiously yearned to believe that their president and his administration were competent defenders of America. Obviously, there are currently many terrorists active in Iraq, but few were there until we drew them in from other countries or created many more of their own native variety. The country went to open war with itself only after we became occupiers whom everyone on the ground suspected wanted their oil. This is where Bush’s egoistic failure to recruit people brighter and better educated than himself came a cropper and caused several dangerous unintended consequences.
Virtually every legitimate Middle Eastern scholar protested that this Bush administration pipe dream, Plan B about establishing a Jeffersonian democracy, without a century or more of cultural and religious change, wasn’t going to persuade tribal Muslims. Shiite and Sunni fundamentalists have fought one another off and on for fourteen centuries, backing different ruling coalitions, damming each other as heretics for much too long to govern peaceably together because an ideological team of true believers in laissez faire capitalism in Washington expected to peddle a fake democracy. The ordinary people relished the idea of choosing Muslim leaders of their own religious and political persuasion but not of cooperating with an ancient enemy. The Sunnis were so skeptical they didn't bother to vote in the first referendum. And should they gain power enough to choose a national future, the fundamental Shia people of Iraq would immediately turn to Shiite Iran to create a government of mullahs in the Iranian image. The Iraqis would very likely form a religious and political coalition with the former Iranian enemies of secular-minded Saddam. The American generals on the ground are already admitting that the clergy have assumed more influence in daily life than the recently elected members of the new government. Iraqi mullahs have a bad image in America but they have financed and run schools, charities and social services across the Arabic world for centuries and as the mullahs in Iran, Saudi Arabia did, have little trouble gathering large groups of faithful Muslims to support them.
The Plan B dream of creating an Iraqi Republic was also a fallback scheme used by Bush and company to persuade American parents to send their children to the war. I respect and admire the youngsters who defend America from danger. I once was one of them, serving in the old Brown Shoe Army Air Forces. However, I despise the wicked abusers who spend young lives as if pocket change to further their narcissistic plans. I can understand and even respect why so many grieving parents are unable to blame the narcissistic triad of preachers, politicians and plutocrats who sent their kids in harms way. I grieve deeply for the mother who said that had she had known her son was going to bleed to death in a dirty alley in Baghdad, she would have sent him anyway -- in order to defend America from terrorists of Iraq who hate us because we are a free democratic nation. The poor woman has not a clue as to why the Bush administration sent her son to die so far from home. Their elite vision of the future America is one of a great many poorly paid peasant workers, a severely shrunken middle class with a modest income and about five hundred families and companies that control ninety percent of the national wealth. I sincerely hope the twisted ploys, formulated by Bush's propagandists gives the sad mother some solace. They are going to offer her nothing else. I understand, it is too painful for many grieving mothers and fathers to admit to themselves - that their youngsters suffered or died in a war to increase the already obscene windfall profits ripped from society by Texaco or British Petroleum, et al. Such tortured parents gain an illusion of relief by unconsciously transforming the pain of a totally counterproductive war into a gallant crusade to keep America from being overrun by the dangerous Iraqi date pickers, plowboys and goat herds so demonized by the scheme spinners. The suffering parents are tragic victims of some very clever proto-fascist propaganda.
Much of the Middle East is a miserable and therefore violent society. Many more Muslims have been slain by other Muslims than by all other religionists combined. And when the Shiites outvoted the Sunni by three to one, their near universal reaction was to take revenge against the hated Baathist Sunnis who had been Saddam’s hatchet men for decades. Already the new government of Iraq has organized undercover murder squads to stalk their ancient enemies. Some of the newly elected Shia officials are currently holding secret talks with the Shiite rulers of Iran. Since the Sunnis themselves knew their blood was going to be spilled by the majority Shia, they jumped the gun and tried to defeat the people who’d made them vulnerable -- Shiites and their American allies. What looks like madness or random slaughter to us, makes sense to the people fighting daily for enough food and water to survive. And now that the inevitable reaction against our occupation is becoming a civil war, we really must understand and counter the major unintended consequences of the Bush invasion and the occupation of a tribal Muslim society. Or suffer a continual war between two civilizations.
Bush and his abysmally ignorant and egoistic proto-fascists have set the stage for years of Iraqi civil war that can enable the fiercely anti-American clergy of Iran to dominate the region's oil and natural gas unopposed for a generation. Unless that is, the Bush administration hasn't learned anything from the Iraq disaster -- is making plans to invade Iran with many more Muslims and many times more territory than Iraq. Of course that is what the Shia rulers of Iran expect and is why they are arming themselves with nuclear weapons. Obviously, this situation could quickly become very dangerous for the commercial world. The Iranians and Syrians could well choose to cooperate with the Iraqi Army to protect their Shia brothers. The Muslim belief system is very strong in defense of Islamic believers attacked by infidels. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The peasant people really do believe that every martyr for their own form of Islam goes straight to heaven. Muslim soldiers are convinced they truly are doing God's will. Then, for the same reasons the Iranians might interfere, the Jordanians and the Saudis might come to the defense of Sunni Muslins. All of which would make the Turkish government aggressive toward their own ethnic Kurds who would surely want to take advantage of the disruption to create a new Kurdistan carved from Turkish, Iraqi and Iranian oil fields. For years Osama has been calling for attacks on oil wells, refineries and pipelines. In recent months, several warring bands have stepped up their destruction of pipelines and tried to bomb petroleum refineries in the region. A regional war, with Middle East oil production disrupted for even a few months, would be disastrous for every commercial nation from Europe to China and Japan, from the United States to India. How could you afford fifteen dollars a gallon for gasoline and ten thousand dollars to buy enough natural gas to heat one northern home for a winter season? Bush’s complete lack of sophistication about the religious realities of the Middle East's oil region, his eagerness to use military power, despite its disastrous effect among a billion Muslims, has pushed us right to the brink of the slippery slope.
The proto-fascists have created the potential for a major financial collapse across America, Europe and Asia. And it all started with the lie we were invading Iraq to be safe from Saddam’s weapons of mass murder, aided along by the double damned lie that Saddam‘s government was in league with Osama's terrorists during the 9/11 attack -- when the two men despised each other. Saddam was a murderous secular dictator and Osama was a murderous theological zealot. Beyond that and the fact they both spoke Arabic, they distrusted each other intensely. They hated one another as only desert Arabs can hate. And since I myself and many other scholars saw that in 2001, it is impossible to believe that the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the Bush cabinet failed to understand it. Of course they knew all about it -- the problem was the Bush people didn't care. For the second time since World War Two, our home grown proto-fascists were so determined to deliver first America and then the rest of world bound and gagged into the clutches of the financial aristocracy, they failed to appreciate the limits of their own power. These greedy manipulators had no interest in the lessons to be learned from our disaster in Asia, because history gave them neither money nor power, condemned themselves to repeat it. In Indochina, our best and brightest manipulators got us entangled in a civil war by pretending that a few provinces of Vietnam was a real country -- while in Iraq their successors assumed that bitter enemies can forget a thousand years of conflict to create a Jeffersonian republic with all the benefits of democracy they are smothering here at home.
The intelligence agencies of America served the senior Bush wisely and well during the First Gulf War. Obviously, H W Bush was much brighter than his son. He was intelligent and experienced enough to consider the cultural, emotional, economic and religious factors bubbling within Iraq. Because he actually studied something while at Yale, he reined in his forces when they had gone far enough in the First Gulf War, leaving the Iraqi Army structurally intact to manage internal security and kept Saddam in power lest the Baath Party replace him with a true lunatic rather than a mere tyrant. And above all, H W Bush wanted Iraq viable as an oil producing balance to Iranian power within the region. His aggressive and inept son, urged on by Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the Texas oil barons who wanted a foot in the door of Iraq oil production, financed his way into the White House as their point man. They knew he was to be a figurehead, that Cheney would be his prime minister and Rumsfeld his gun slinger. The proto-fascists even planned their own little war in order to cast George in the role of a great wartime president. They seemed to feel while it wasn't much of a war, a small war was better than an era of peace for their leader. They threw wisdom to the winds and launched a completely unnecessary war in a very volatile region. Of course, the death and wounding of more than twelve thousand American peasant soldiers was immaterial. Not one of the proto fascists has a son or daughter bleeding to death in a dirty ditch with both legs blown off -- just as they opted out of Vietnam. As Dick Cheney grunted when asked why he took six deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War rather than serving his country in battle. "I had better things to do with my life than dying in a jungle." So could have said everyone of the twelve thousand casualties Cheney created when he especially insisted that Iraq be taken out. As we to believe that it is completely coincidental that his company, Halliburton, has billed the government to the tune of two billion plus dollars for services and products supplied there?
Even if a world wide disaster doesn’t occur, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and the crippling of the society has placed the petroleum of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Sudan and several other oil producing states, within the orbit of Iran’s Shiite clerics who are currently developing their own nuclear weapons. The ruling mullahs are not stupid. They have broken the code and figured us out. America will attack with impunity small nations that annoy our political and financial aristocracy by wanting to share the global wealth. However, no US administration has ever dared make war on a country that has nuclear weapons -- which could be concealed aboard a tramp steamer, sailed to New York and detonated by a crew of martyrs. Our port authorities examine about one cargo container out of every five hundred of the many millions that are unloaded in our ports annually. And lets’ face it, in regards to the management of those six American ports, a Dubai owned company running American ports from the Gulf region is much more likely to be penetrated by terrorist cells than one managed out of London by blue eyed Brits.
One hundred fifty thousand American troops cannot control the Sunni fighters now, so how could they possibly take on three or four times as many Shiite soldiers of the night? Or shall the administration re-institute the draft and send half a million badly trained boys and girls into a decade of hell at a horrendous financial cost that bankrupts the entire American nation? Shades of Vietnam! Can you really believe that the Bush true believers are one bit more intelligent and competent than our best and brightest aggressors of the Indochina War in which some sixty thousand Americans died and a quarter million were wounded or emotionally crippled? And despite the enormous cost in blood and treasure we were unable to defeat a rag tag peasant army of badly clad, skinny little men and women shivering with malaria in the monsoon. Presidents Johnson and Nixon stormed and raved about the much despised and ridiculed gooks -- who nevertheless, proved to be first class fighting men, arguably the world’s best infantry at their time and place in history as they closed so tight to the American perimeter wire that much of our artillery and aircraft fire was useless. I think we are in grave danger of letting a man more pathologically stubborn than Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, bring another such catastrophe down on America because he is too neurotic to admit his blunders and to call off his dogs of war. We the people shall never have another opportunity to sack Bush from the White House, his last term is crumbling around him, but we surely can replace the proto-fascist senators and representatives who abdicated their responsibility to America in return for God speak endorsement from fundamental preachers and campaign finances from manipulative aristocrats.
The Bush scheme to secure Iraqi bases in order to control Arab oil reserves -- to dominate the region with bases from which to use military force, turned the Middle East’s long simmering dislike for an America that had long saddled them with ruthless rulers who abused their own people, into a boiling hatred that revolutionary leaders are using to fan the flames of revolt. Of course, we could bomb Iran’s nuclear sites, if we knew where they are, but that would be seen as the last straw by some billion Muslims. The world’s economy would collapse within a few months, should the region’s oil fields go up in flames, when terrorists seek revenge against the American people they blame for allowing their politicians to make war at a whim.
C. WE ARE STANDING ON THE BRINK OF A DEVASTATING WAR BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS.
Unless the Bush administration and an ideological Congress recognize and abandon their failures and develop equitable methods of dealing with a world inhabited by masses of frustrated Muslims, we are going down a slippery slope indeed. Our leaders must mature beyond the egoistic use of commercial and military power, simply because the have it, power that can neither intimidate nor control small stateless cells of enraged enemies. A thousand clever men from among the masses of Muslims, with a compulsion to do something they see as purposeful to their religious faith by becoming jihad martyrs, could destroy enough pipe lines and oil tankers to cripple our industrial civilization. Fewer than twenty men on 9/11 seized four commercial aircraft and killed almost three thousand people. The terrorists forced a panic-stricken American president into accepting thousands of military casualties, to seriously weaken the Army, and to embrace a devastating national debt that shall haunt future generations. The Congress abandoned its crucial responsibilities and crippled our educational, health care and veterans programs and savaged our judiciary and criminal justice system with secret police and Star Chamber judges at the behest of the proto-fascists who dominate them. Never in the history of human conflict have so few men caused such a terrified reaction from a great nation. Now, what can a thousand terrorists do to American interests and people unless we find a better way to insure peace and prosperity than an eye for an eye and a tooth and a tooth conflict that continues to escalate?
Iraq itself is the prime example of a collapsed oil based society. A comparatively few determined Iraqi men keep oil production at a fraction of its former level. Unfortunately, I cannot see any great wisdom emerging from this administration. Nothing appealing to religious Arabs is rising from the hearts and minds of narcissistic men and women who have grubbed for wealth and power so long they have gone spiritually bankrupt. There is so much money afloat in our political system that users and abusers have seized virtually all power in America, have worked long and hard to destroy grass roots American democracy, have found it much more profitable to spend a pittance of their vast wealth to enrich wicked politicians and preachers for betraying their people rather than to pay a living wage to millions of workers. They cannot even conceive of a society where their values and motives are largely irrelevant to most people so they are not likely to solve this horrendous challenge.
Finally, I am forced to conclude that we Americans generally receive the kind of governance we deserve. We have a world class political system given us by the founders of the Republic but of late, we seem to have lost the ability to elect politicians who serve anyone except the religious and financial elite. If we do not force our leaders to treat us with respect and dignity, if we do not weed out the betrayers in the narcissistic triad of fundamental clergy, reactionary politicians and financial manipulators, we and our children and grandchildren shall have to be content with the crumbs that fall from their ever more sumptuous banquet tables. We Americans shall settle to the global average emotionally, politically and financially, until our grandchildren are working for two or three dollars an hour and the manipulators get the rest. Unless, of course, we understand and reject the fundamental, reactionary and financial manipulative propaganda and start holding the narcissistic triad’s feet to the fire and putting the fear of God and the people in the hearts and minds of every elected official. We must start by rejecting their pipe dreams and frustrating their neurotic attacks on the middle class and sacking every preacher and politician who supports vested interest groups that sacrifice the good of the people for their own benefit. Refute their wicked and deceitful sexist, racist, scientific and free market propaganda -- for the proto-fascists hire the world’s best motivational and marketing psychologists to make you fear what they fear and to love what they love -- to the destruction of the American middle class and sound futures for our children and grandchildren. The Iraq war remains but a symptom of something deeply dangerous and damaging to the America we love.
Authors Website: http://www.logotherapylearningcenter.com
Authors Bio: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 than a score psychology books, seminars, assessment instruments and novels and was psychology professor and chair at Olivet and Westminster Colleges. He taught leadership psychology seminars for years at the Universities of Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue and Arizona and for executives and managers of major firms from New York, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles, Singapore, Brisbane, Auckland et al.
Jard DeVille is now recognized by many as the most prolific and creative successor to Vicktor Frankl. For decades he and Roberta -- his wife and co-author and daughter Dee, who is their editor and computer guru, have followed Viktor's approach to identifying meaningful lifestyles. They spent decades researching Logotherapy, rubbing concepts together while pastoring and teaching in churches, colleges and universities, working in and directing clinics and consulting in large and small organizations of various kinds around the world. During their adult lives Jard and Roberta have produced a virtual library of books, seminars, and psychological assessment instruments -- most of them based on the Logotherapy constructs they first learned from Viktor forty years ago and then modified as they became more and more competent and thoughtful for themselves. Every one of the seventeen book length study courses in the LOGOTHERAPY LEARNING CENTER'S core curriculum, is their own work. As Viktor once said -- a dwarf seated on a giant's shoulder can sometimes see further down the trail than can the giant. They have modified Logotherapy in this manner.
LOGOTHERAPY = f (Personal Meaning x Communal Belonging)
Jard combined Viktor's focus on personal meaning with his own emphasis on situations and relationships where one belongs emotionally -- where good people are accepted, loved and trusted in places of the heart.
Jard's leadership psychology classes in the University of Arizona's Executive Development Program at Tucson, made a major difference in several hundred sound institutions. They were rated extremely well by scores of hard nosed middle managers. These men and women, chosen for top level leadership training by many world wide organizations gave his courses an astonishing 3.68 average on a four point scale for almost a decade. When he was the lead psychology professor at Olivet College, his expertise built the Psychology Department from eight to forty majors in two years. He taught Frankl's Logotherapy principles to hundreds of pastors including programs sponsored by spiritual leaders in several major denominations.
During his college teaching tour of duty, Jard recruited around one hundred fine young persons for professional programs in clinical and consulting psychology. Hardcover books NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST and LOVERS FOR LIFE were major front list books in WILLIAM MORROW'S catalogues when they were first published. GRACE UNDER PRESSURE first appeared as Jard's textbook in the Executive Development Program at the University of Arizona and then was published in hard cover by Farnsworth as THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEADERSHIP -- and then in paperback for their Executive Growth Series by the New American Library publishing house. PARENTING WINNING CHILDREN originated as his continuing education sessions for Jard's teachers and psychologists in his training seminars when he was Director of The Child Conservation Center. This was a dyslexic learning and learning disabilities therapy clinic conjoined with the University of Wisconsin.