Why two thirds of the American middle class believe our deceitful president should be neutered politically.

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Don’t look for any scholarly footnotes here. This is my personal account of what I believe to be happening to our beloved America because of the cruel scams now being perpetrated against the nation. We are in a financial and freedom death struggle with a narcissistic triad of no more political, religious and financial manipulators than could be carried aboard one Boeing 747 on a single flight. These greedy schemers include the three hundred-fifty or so ruthless financial abusers who currently control ninety percent of American wealth. They are ruthless abusers who are constantly running scams to keep the last few crumbs from falling from their sumptuous tables into middle class hands. Because they wanted power to dominate us, the aristocracy used their propaganda machine to trick us into electing president an inept Texan who would have peaked selling used cars in Midland, had he not been a highly privileged and artfully born again Bush scion. The elite also created the near psychopathic reactionary Republican coalition in order to maintain their domination of society at our expense. Of course the aristocracy now ravaging the America Republic from within the White House and the Congress neither bloody their own hands nor do the heavy lifting in their assault on America.

The ruthless financial aristocracy recruits neurotic and paranoid wannabes from within the ranks of reactionary politicians, fundamental preachers, radical print journalists and hate radio babblers, in order to propagandize the naïve voters of America. I feel very strongly that our American democracy and the late great middle class that made our land so successful, are deliberately being sold down the river into the snake, spider and scorpion infested cane fields. I very clearly perceive that we patriotic citizens who fought America’s wars, worked hard all our lives, worshipped devoutly and played by the rules, are being crucified because we and our families believe we deserve to share in the American dream. Of course, we must realize that the disastrous results of globalization are not an inevitable outcome of capitalism -- but a deliberate scheme by the financial aristocracy to sweep all of the world’s wealth into their own coffers. We must understand that no economist can honestly deny the reality of this scam with his drivel about the economy doing so well on Wall Street. So it does, for the benefit of the elite -- because global finance was designed to give them the wealth, even as middle class America is swiftly losing the purchasing power needed to keep our economy strong into the future.

As I see it, after I have spent lifetime of psycho-spiritual researching, teaching, preaching and counseling, the aristocratic globalization scam is being used to divide the American nation into a handful of extremely powerful families and their more numerous panderers -- while forcing worker bee Americans into poorly paid serfdom so the elite users and abusers can seize virtually all the power, possessions, pleasure and prestige. There are many reasons why men and women will sacrifice their humanity to gain great wealth but the unconscious factor that flogs them on and on is almost always a wounded ego. No emotionally or spiritually healthy parent will sacrifice two or three families to divorce, addiction and neuroticism in order to become wealthy and so powerful that one can never again be devalued or challenged. This is the stuff of mental illness and it is a form of overcompensation from infancy and childhood when one was forced to feel inept and useless, to internalize free floating anxiety that continues to drive the wounded person relentlessly. When neurotic sufferers become enormously wealthy and powerful, they virtually always start portray themselves as important personages who have attained god-like significance. People who need thousand dollar shower curtains, a hundred two thousand dollar suits or gowns and two hundred pairs of hand made shoes, in order to feel good about life and their place in it, are desperately trying to sooth a crippled ego. Alas, most of them fail, for there isn’t enough power, prestige or possessions in the world to plug the bottomless hole in the egos of such men and women. As I wrote about neurotic persons in my book The Liberated Soul, most strongly acquisitive men and women who are fiercely driven to appear important and find lasting security, are consumed by terrible anxieties about their own mortality. They are trying desperately to gain such power and prestige that even death itself will yield to their determination to be spectacularly significant and God-like. Even men like Andrew Carniege and John D. Rockefeller were forced at last to make amends for their greed by giving much of their wealth away when they realized the could neither spend it all nor take it with them to the grave. And I cannot think of any current public figure who reveals his ego wounds more clearly than George W. Bush.

I believe all loyal Americans should enthusiastically welcome the current return to sanity reflected in the declining presidential and congressional polls. We have long needed to come to our senses during the vicious political, spiritual and financial war now being waged against the middle class by the ruthless cabal of proto-fascist Republicans of whom George W. Bush is merely the front man and most visible member. It is long past time we voters realized that the emperor and his yapping hate mongers are wearing no clothes. For a generation now, the greedy abusers called neo-conservatives have waged a war to dominate the world‘s economy. They have fostered the great financial scam called globalization in which the half century long Cold War, the Indochina and Iraqi wars and even the compromise of democracy and the looming destruction of the Republic, are but skirmishes. The ultimate scam of wicked reactionary politicians, fundamental preachers and authoritarian plutocrats is to deliver more and more wealth and power to the new breed of global robber barons for whom America means nothing more than a major market. Any country will suit them just fine if it offers more wealth. Of course, the term neo-conservative is no longer adequate to describe this narcissistic triad of manipulators currently dominating our nation for its own benefit. The truth of the matter is far more complex.

The financial aristocracy is currently being served very well through the egoistic ambitions of the Bush family, with clever handlers such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and until recently Card, who are used and well paid but never admitted into the elite inner circle. The Bush family also uses congressional bullies like Tom DeLay, Rick Santorim and many others. Some religious leaders in the cabal yearn for a theocracy which they control rather than a democracy in which the people are free to worship and vote as they please. This element of the triad includes James Dobson, Pat Robertson and most of the Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic hierarchy. I believe the very strange political bedfellows that come from fundamental backwoods churches and very expensive Dallas and Houston country clubs, must be seen as proto-fascistic neurotics.

We never have had any guarantees that the Republic would survive the greed of our ruthless home grown abusers. When a Philadelphia woman asked Ben Franklin what he and the other founders had accomplished, he quipped -- We have given you a republic, Madam -- if you can keep it. Old Ben was no fool -- he knew that there are always egoistic abusers driven by psychological and spiritual wounds to seek the illusion of personal significance by amassing great wealth and power. Some persons think about nothing but wealth and power and how to acquire them for thirty or forty years. They go through spouses and families like they were swapping used cars. Lord Charles Babbington of McCaulay, wrote perceptively in his superb history of the British Empire. (I paraphrase) Every noble family, royal kingdom, profitable company and vast civilization eventually destroys itself by creating so many vested interest groups that it cannot adapt in time to survive when it must surrender something important or perish. Franklin who lived in England about the time Lord McCaulay was writing, understood that of the twenty-two civilizations which left their footprints on Earth, all but two collapsed because of their narcissistic internal contradictions. That isn’t to say there wasn’t some younger, more flexible society waiting in the wings to give a final shove, but the defeat was almost always self induced. What makes you think that twenty-first century America is any different? Do the names of China, Brazil and India come to mind as our egoistic abusers are busy devouring the American middle class through which the powerful Republic was supported? Never, since the Civil War when Lee’s Confederates occupied Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the way to Philadelphia and possibly New York, has the Republic been in such danger. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty! We still have in our hands the power of the ballot to hamstring the wicked abusers who betray America by bleeding us white by concentrating even more of the world’s wealth into their grasping hands.

Because of our anxiety about terrorist attacks and ignorance about Islam, we were traumatized on 9/11 and relentlessly propagandized to believe at least three impossible things the radical Republicans were peddling to naïve Americans before breakfast every morning. We immediately gave George W. Bush et al, the power needed to put many self-destructive scams into practice. No more than two dozen reactionary proto-fascists in the Congress and the White House propagandized America into supporting the disastrous Iraqi War that has America teetering on the slippery slope of a guerrilla conflict between civilizations. A great many Americans are just not bright or psychologically astute enough to see through the clever proto-fascist propaganda. It was as if our cultural memory about the ten years of the bloody Vietnam War had been erased by the aristocracy’s seduction machine. We saluted and lined up, ready to sacrifice our kids and our wealth all over again when the war drums began to beat. Even ninety percent of the American Army’s worker bees at risk in Iraq, have been so brainwashed by their officers that they still believe Saddam and Osama planned the 9/11 attacks together even though the men despised and distrusted each other. The soldiers still accept the spin, even after the Bush administration admitted in public it had been mistaken to make such an assumption.

We were so seduced that the neo-Confederates of the south and west, those rural minded true believers claiming the greatest patriotism, have joined political forces with the country club set that despises them as white trash, elitists that are doing everything possible to starve the middle class. Politics do make strange bed fellows! Fundamental preachers control the generally sexist and racist NASCAR bunch that never forgave the Democratic Party for forcing civil rights legislation down their throats a generation ago. The clergy rant about the wicked forces of liberalism and the eternal security of fundamental worship. On the other side of this strange equation, the financially affluent and politically sophisticated country club set sees through the financial scams but vote for proto-fascists politicians anyway because of the vast wealth in play.

Should you be tempted to discount the ability of rag-head tribal Muslims to cause even more American pain in a war between civilizations, as the Bush administration sold America a bill of goods about a splendid little war, try very hard to remember what only nineteen fundamental true believers did on that terrible day in September when we lost our innocence during the collapse of the Twin Towers. Can’t you remember that not one Iraqi youngster attacked America on 9/11 and virtually no anti-American terrorists were operating out of Baghdad until we created them by occupying their homeland? Al Qaida came in later, but only after we made a multitude of enemies through our inept political and military occupation. Soon after 9/11, I wrote that a great many Arab peasants were going to die from a flood of American bombs and shells. I said at the time I hoped that a few of the slain would be guilty perpetrators, although I feared that most of them would be what is euphemistically called collateral damage by the military. Well, the count of collaterally dead Iraqis has already reached a hundred thousand men women and children. Of course, should you get your world news from hate radio ditto heads who propagandize incessantly to support reactionary politicians and fundamental preachers, you can blame the collapse of the middle class, the 9/11 attack and the ever more violent civil war on Bill and Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy and John Murtha and other liberals who want to get our kids out of the slaughter pens of the Middle East. You can even pretend that the Middle Eastern war isn’t about dominating Middle Eastern petroleum by calling our neo-colonial war of conquest a justifiable struggle for the liberation of the Arab peoples, but that doesn’t convert a lie into the truth. You can call a rabid skunk a loving Beagle, but you had better not invite it in as a house pet.

The radical Republican proto-fascists now slipping in the polls as the people finally realize who is betraying them and their military kids, did everything possible in their scam to deliver control of Middle Eastern petroleum to their oil barons. For, while the ideological users and abusers first argued that the Iraqi war was fought to protect us from weapons of mass destruction and then claimed to be converting vengeful and aggressive Afghani and Iraqi tribesmen to born again Jeffersonian democrats, few Americans and Europeans -- besides neurotic idiots and vested abusers -- still believe the radical Republican delusions. Only narcissistic true believers ignore the connection between the war and the billions and billions in windfall profits reaped by Texaco, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil and others after our invasion and the three years of drawn-out fighting sent energy costs through the roof. The Bush family has won millions of windfall dollars from their petroleum investments in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere while George has been in the White House. I believe this financial scheme is why Bush recently reiterated his mantra that we must win the war in Iraq at all costs -- and then keep an occupying force there indefinitely in order to defeat Al Qaeda’s terrorists. Of course, I simply cannot believe that any member of the Bush family ever gave one hoot in Hades about delivering tattered and snaggle tooth Iraqi peasants from Saddam‘s clutches. The aristocratic first family simply doesn't think in those terms about the peasants of the world, according to the servants who have worked for the family through the years. The autocratic Republican view of personal freedom, certainly doesn’t reflect the right of ordinary citizens to govern themselves and choose national policies through electing honest legislators. It is much more about relaxing regulations within authoritarian nations so their corporations can create lessez faire governments they operate on their own terms. That is proto-fascist democracy!

The Bush administration invaded Iraq to build a dozen or more permanent military bases in Iraq in order to dominate the Middle East oil fields with permanent American forces. It had absolutely nothing to do with democratic nation building until the WMD scam blew up in the president‘s face. These bases are why Iranian leaders are now frantic to produce a supply of their own nuclear weapons. The mullahs are not stupid, they can count to ten, and they have figured out that the United States, during the ten large and small wars we have fought since World Two, has never attacked a nation with nuclear arms. In our country where tens of millions of cargo containers are unloaded annually, with less than five percent of them visually inspected, a nation with its own nuclear bombs could smuggle a few ashore in any number of ways -- to be detonated aboard a boat near downtown Manhattan or from a truck crossing the Potomac Bridge into Washington. Obviously, they have no trouble finding suicide drivers. There was even a rumor that during the Cold War, the Soviets smuggled several nuclear weapons into New York and Washington and cached them in underground basements to use in the event of a nuclear war. The story is, they were surreptitiously removed when the Cold War ended during the Gorbachev era.

Obviously, George Bush is more than willing to continue trading American and Iraqi lives in order to increase the net worth of the already obscenely wealthy families who control the great oil companies. Why else would the Bush administration be building those military basses in Iraq while claiming to be creating a democracy? Bush and the narcissistic proto-fascist triad intended never to leave the poor desert nation, even if they must drown what is left of Iraqi society in blood. Moreover, can you really believe that while virtually every opinion page editor in America predicted the wartime surge in oil profits, the resistance of the Iraqi people to occupation and the civil war now in its opening stage, George Bush and his in-house proto-fascists couldn’t foresee those consequences of their war? Obviously, a stubborn president convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still. They didn’t want to see the consequences.

In his recent vow to continue the war for bringing his brand of freedom from taxes and restrictive regulations to the Middle East, Bush cleverly avoids defining either democracy or the conditions under which our weary troops shall come home. Some of the Guard and Regular units are now deploying for their third and fourth tours of duty in Iraq. And while they are magnificent young men and woman, (I served among their predecessors in the Brown Shoe Army Air Forces), too much is enough. Military marriages are breaking up and the V A hospital I use is filled with kids suffering terrible head wounds. Homes, automobiles and careers are being lost through continuous deployment. And the count now goes past twenty thousand wounded and dead American for the greater glory of Texaco, British Petroleum and several others.

The financial elite are spending so much money corrupting radical politicians and fundamental preachers that the strengths of democracy are collapsing around us. Radical legislators with well filled coffers and reactionary Supreme Court justices with overcompensated egos now serve the proto-fascist aristocracy rather the middle class in virtually every important issue. The greedy manipulators, as personified by three or four generations of the Bush family, understand that they don’t need to conduct a banana republic type revolution to control virtually everything they choose. All they need do is spend one ten thousandths of one percent of their profits to bribe a few hundred greedy members of congress. That expenditure is a great deal less than paying living wages to twenty or thirty million middle-class workers. The formerly highly placed economist within the Federal Reserve, Milton Friedman, stated that the only moral responsibility of a business organization is to increase profits. At all costs? By dumping poisonous wastes into your community’s drinking water to save money -- or by hastening global warning or by spreading carcinogenic chemicals far and wide by refusing to waste money on scrubbers for your smokestacks?

Bought and paid for reactionary economists, obviously reject the idea that taxes are the price we pay for civilization with sound public schools, good roads, opportunities for disenfranchised families to come into the middle class, affordable medical care and decent retirement benefits. Their narcissistic patrons want it all. The vast Bush tax reduction program made him a hero from the beginning of his first administration. It must have soothed his wounded ego for a few months for he was soon back asking for another fix. Kitty Kelly reported that the Bush family mind set includes just two kinds of men and women. Most people are among the inconsequential workers of society who salute and obey their betters. Then there are the real people, the few members of elite country clubs with whom the Bush family plays golf and tennis. All of which leaves them virtually no interest in and no concern for a working middle class except to fight their wars and do the labor needed to keep their enterprises profitable across the world. After all, the middle class bees siphon off far too much wealth that would otherwise go into their own coffers.

From the beginning of the current administration, even as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld began the continuous drum beat to gain support for the Iraqi War with their weapons of mass destruction scam, the invasion really was about controlling Middle Eastern oil. No one could stop them; even as George was pretending to seek ways to avoid an invasion, he and Tony Blair had already resurrected the British dream of a born again Middle Eastern Empire. This pretense was only one of the many deceptions Bush used to pull the wool over American eyes. It was easy after the proto-fascists had a firm grip on the levers of American power. The White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and much of the Supreme Court were firmly in their hands. They still are, as Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Alioto convinced the neo-fascists of their parallel mind sets during a very careful vetting before their names ever appeared on the evening news. The Middle East campaign was really about oil and wealth while everything about weapons of mass destruction, defeating Iraqi terrorists and bringing democracy to the unwashed peasants of the region has been a stream of deceit spun to manipulate Americans by the proto-fascists of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, when it turned out so wrong, as the victory was botched, the happiest man in the world about our occupation of Iraq must have been Osama Bin Ladin. The ignorant and hubristic members of the administration delivered him a golden opportunity on a silver platter. Osama recruited fiercely anti-American suicidal youngsters against whom there is little defense except protecting everyone and everything of value in the Green Zone of Baghdad. Many anxious or naïve American gave the narcissistic proto-fascist triad of politicians, preachers and plutocrats every opportunity to succeed in their debilitating scam. The reactionary Republican Congress gave the manipulators carte blanche from the beginning. They were like two fisted drinkers, filling and refilling the whiskey glass for the President. The manipulators created a massive national debt for our descendents to suffer 0ver by spending massive amounts of treasure on a scam war while cutting taxes for the proto-fascists. The autocrats betrayed the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The greedy turned the Clinton budget surplus into a massive debt for the next generation to struggle under, with the pretense that the vast tax cuts would create an economic boon that would more than restore the difference. It was all an ideological lie.

Fortunately, as Lincoln said; While you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. A majority of the American people now see how poorly Bush and his administration has done. About two thirds of the American people and nine tenths of the Western World’s citizens no longer believe much of anything Bush says nor trusts him to make sound decisions. Like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Indochina era, he yearned desperately to heal his wounded ego with the healing balm or power and prestige, to become known as one of the greatest American presidents. He challenged history to put him on a pedestal with Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. But he entangled himself as did Johnson and Nixon, in a disastrous scam for all the wrong reasons and now has guaranteed for himself the scorn of history. Alas, it is not in their unlucky stars that men falter and fail -- but in their very souls. The psycho-spiritual failings of George Bush, come right out of his soul’s ego wounds. Bush had an opportunity to do great things for America after the 9/11 attack but although he seemed to be off to a good start, he soon faltered and chose to betray America to give greater wealth and power to his aristocratic manipulators. Most Americans now believe that he is a man in over his depth, who faltered when his high office ambitions put him to the test. Beware, your sins shall find you out. It need not have been so, he could have been one of the great presidents had he served America half as well as he took care of the proto-fascist aristocracy.

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

Of course, while Bush deserves to be impeached and convicted of many gross crimes and misdemeanors, he and his aristocratic supporters have outfoxed us once more. A successful impeachment would move an even more dangerous autocrat, Richard Cheney, into the White House. God alone knows what havoc he would cause our middle class democracy once he became the American president. Rather than impeach Bush, we should probably get out and use the ballot box to elect enough progressive legislators to neuter this inept president and those who are crippling the America Republic through their neurotic and near psychopathic greed. We must do everything necessary to re-establish the middle class that made America prosperous and strong for so long.

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.