Bush's Magical History Tour

[Miss Authoritiva]

Magical History Tour
Bush can't learn from the past if he can't see it.
By William Saletan
Posted Monday, May 24, 2004, at 11:57 PM PT


In press conferences, TV ads, and interviews this year, President Bush has manifested a series of psychopathologies: an abstract notion of reality, confidence unhinged from facts and circumstances, and a conception of credibility that requires no correspondence to the external world. Tonight, as he vowed to stay the course in Iraq, Bush demonstrated another mental defect: incomprehension of his role in history as a fallible human agent. Absent such comprehension, Bush can't fix his mistakes in Iraq because he can't see how—or even that—he screwed up.

Here's how Bush, in his speech this evening, described Iraq's place in history:

In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country, and events have come quickly. Americans have seen the flames of Sept. 11, followed battles in the mountains of Afghanistan … We've seen killers at work on trains in Madrid, in a bank in Istanbul, in a synagogue in Tunis, and at a nightclub in Bali. And now the families of our soldiers and civilian workers pray for their sons and daughters in Mosul, in Karbala, in Baghdad. We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus. We must do our duty. History is moving, and it will tend toward hope or tend toward tragedy.

The description is almost biblical.

<more>




http://slate.msn.com/id/2101011/

[MissMarple]

1. His history tour is a mystery to anyone rooted in anything close to reality

"I've done nothing wrong" Now where have we heard that before?

And how does an entire administration appear to lack any critical thinking skills? They only listen to people who agree with them, everyone else is WRONG.

[jeff30997]

2. Magical History Tour ?

I would call it Bush's Tragical Hysteria Tour. :)

[enough]

3. Saletan really illuminates the mind of the Chimp.

It's worth it to follow the links in the first paragraph to read some of his earlier pieces that go into Bush*s mentality. Saletan is amazingly skillful at getting at the nature of his thought processes, such as they are.

Thanks for posting this.

[teryang]

4. Arrogance of the Dictator

Reality is what I say it is.

This is a fundamental premise of bushonian rule and principle of contemporary American power. With hundreds of billions in patronage, control of the Pentagon and covert instruments of power, a subservient corporate press and Supreme Court, and the state monopoly of violence, unchecked by constitutional constraints, who can successfully challenge him?

His regime has already gotten away with some huge crimes.

Further "terrorist" events to order can be arranged and sold to a ignorant, frightened and gullible public. The Florida 2000 election was a laboratory for a grander experiment in 2004. It may not matter at all what he says or thinks. Indeed this is effrontery of the totalitarian mind. The *resident making a mockery of the WMD fraud which has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries is a fitting example. The endless reiteration of known falsehoods is just another version of who cares what you think, many will believe this (and they do).

According to the "dynamic tension" Nazi blueprint, adopted by CIA operatives not long after WWII and obviously understood well by the likes of Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Bush, one can always transcend the chaos of the last history making subtrefuge by conjuring a new and more shocking event from the covert operations bag of tricks. 911 followed immediately by the (enabling act) Patriot Act is a version of the Reichstag fire scheme carried out by Goering who is credited with the famous quote:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."

It has been said that this effective Machiavellian strategy dates back to ancient Rome. The 911 event pushed discussion of the 2000 coup to the back burner.

P2 SOG is something Rumsfeld wanted to set up early in the administration. Carelessly, it was an overt reference to the CIA/ P2 lodge conspiracy in post war Italy, which practiced employing bombers to commits acts of terrorism and then blaming those acts on Italian communists. Such terrorist acts created the right environment for rightest extremists to succeed politically in Italy.

Bush is well aware of the efficacy of such tactics to save his regime time and again after each new outrage. He is a totalitarian dictator in the making. His propaganda machine is infinitely more sophisticated than any before it. That one's political message rings entirely false to the careful observer matters little in such situations. To even posture as a candidate for office or a journalist, one has to pretend that none of this is true.

[Martin Eden]

5. Bush's unhealthy relationship with reality

I thought this December '03 column by David Corn is worth another look:

Is the President a Pathological Liar?
Bush’s unhealthy relationship with reality
by David Corn

It was a set-up question. Conservative radio talk-show host Michael Medved was trying to bait me, to push me into saying something so out of whack about the commander in chief that I would destroy my own credibility before the audience of his nationally syndicated show. It was a ruse I’ve become quite familiar with in recent weeks, since I published a book demurely titled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. In scores of media interviews, right-wing hosts have pressed me to pronounce Bush the all-time biggest SOB-of-a-liar in the White House and essentially accuse him of being a psycho. I have resisted the invitations, choosing to stick to my just-the-facts case that Bush has misled the public on a host of issues — the war in Iraq, his tax cuts, global warming, Social Security, his own past and more. The goal of these interlocutors is to dismiss any harsh critique of Bush as nothing more than angry-left name-calling. I obviously believe Bush has lied often and consistently about grave matters, but I have shied away from labeling Bush “pathological” and the like.

Now I wonder about that.

What forced this reconsideration was a speech Bush delivered in late November to several thousand troops at Butts Army Air Field in Fort Carson, Colorado. On this occasion, Bush served up the usual rah-rah about the war on terrorism. But as he was hailing the U.S. military, he remarked, “Working with a fine coalition, our military went to Afghanistan, destroyed the training camps of al Qaeda and put the Taliban out of business forever.”

Out of business forever?
Read more:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/02/news-corn.php

[Martin Eden]

6. Idiot or Liar? Either Way, Bush is Unfit for Office

I've posted this before but if you missed it, this short column is well worth the read:

by John V. Whitbeck
Idiot or Lar? Either Way, Bush is Unfit for office

JEDDAH, 19 August 2003 — On July 25, President George W. Bush made a truly staggering statement to the press after a meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program?And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region.”

This statement is worth reading carefully. The president of the United States has stated, in a public forum, that he invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not allow weapons inspectors back into his country. So far as I am aware, this statement has not been the subject of any serious critical analysis in the mainstream American media. I will therefore provide my own brief analysis. Assuming, as seems reasonable, that the president of the United States was neither drunk nor on LSD, there can be only two possible explanations for this statement:

Explanation 1: The president of the United States believed what he said. In this case, he is so dim-witted and/or totally divorced from reality as to be mentally unfit to hold his current job — or, indeed, any job — and should be taken into medical care.

Explanation 2: The president did not believe what he said but, rather, believes (unfortunately not without compelling post-Sept.11 evidence) that the vast majority of the American people are so dim-witted and/or uninformed and the vast majority of the American media is so sycophantic and/or terrified of being branded “unpatriotic” (or simply losing White House “access”) that he can now tell any lie, no matter how obvious and outrageous, and get away with it. In this case, he is morally unfit to hold his current job and should, by constitutional means, be forced to relinquish it as soon as possible.

Please read the ending; it's a REAL kicker:
http://www.arabnews.com/services/print/print.asp?artid=30536&d=19&m=8&y=2003&hl=Idiot%20or%20Liar?%20Either%20Way,%20Bush%20Is%20Unfit%20for%20Office