The miscreant dynasty

[kliljedahl]

By Howell Raines
December 19, 2005
The Bush generations have enriched themselves
while impoverishing the presidency.

AT THIS point, the policy legacy of George Bush seems pretty well defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, corporate influence over tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign science — the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the modern era — amounts to a political legacy that can haunt the Republic for years to come.

We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken the playbook of the "ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a consistent code of amorality in both campaign tactics and governance. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money, image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism, his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and union gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and, yes, even Lincoln, two generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.

Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are what passes in American for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, George Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and social significance that, given his animosity to scholarly thought, he almost certainly does not understand.

Here's the big picture, as drawn most effectively by the Republican political analyst Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. Starting in 1850, the Bushes through alliance with the smarter Walker clan, built up a fortune based on classic robber-baron foundations: railways, steel, oil, investment banking, armaments and materiel in the world wars. They had ties to the richest families of the industrial age: Rockefeller, Harriman, Brookings. Yet they never adopted the charitable, public-service ethic that developed in those families

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[babylonsister]

1. Wow, pretty scathing picture of the BFEE, and frightening.

If Raines is correct, there's not a compassionate bone to be found.:-(

[kliljedahl]

2. You thought there might be?

I know the answer, but I had to ask.


Keith’s Barbeque Central

[babylonsister]

3. Of course you did, and I

understand. Despite my self-proclaimed eternal optimism, it just doesn't count here.

[laheina]

8. Read Kitty Kelley's book.

They are disgusting.

[regnaD kciN]

4. And isn't it revealing...

...that the former editor of the New York Times needs to go to an Australian paper to get this published?

[Peace Patriot]

5. Consider the source. My first hit on this: misdirection.

If we blame everything on that bad old "Bush dynasty," we might not see, a) the collusion--and possible criminality--of the New York Times in Bush's war on Iraq and other Mideast countries, and in keeping the Bush Cartel in power through stolen elections and coverups of their crimes, and b) the collusion--and possible criminality--of allied parties, such as U.S. Senators and Congress people, including many Democrats, in both items, the war and stolen elections/coverups.

The NYT propagandized the war relentlessly, with a pack of lies from its star reporter Judith Miller such as we have not seen in US journalism since the Spanish-American war. The NYT legitimized this war, and other news organizations took their cue from the NYT. They thus created an illusion of support for the war--in the teeth of public opinion polls showing that nearly 60% of the American people opposed the war prior to the invasion (Feb. '03), and continued to oppose it in big numbers straight through to today. They furthermore, through Miller, colluded in the outing and endangerment of a covert CIA counter-proliferation agent, and an entire covert counter-proliferation project, 20 years in the making, and in the coverup of that Bush Cartel crime. Now we find out they covered for Bush for an entire year--in the leadup to the 2004 election--on blatant violation of laws that forbid domestic spying. And I'm sure this is not the end of the crimes that the NYT has colluded with the Bush Cartel to commit.

The war on Iraq is as much the NYT's war as it is Bush's--including all of its attendant crime, not the least of which was the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the ON-GOING torture of many people whose names we don't even know.

The Senators and Congress people who voted to give away their Constitutional power to declare war to George Bush in October 2002 violated the Constitution and their oaths of office that day, and have compounded that crime by giving the Cartel billions and billions and billions of taxpayers' dollars to torture and kill innocent people, and to commit massive theft with no accountability.

On Nov. 2, 2004, the NYT--along with every other US war profiteering corporate news monopoly--covered up the stolen election by, a) promulgating FALSIFIED exit polls that had been "adjusted" to "fit" the "official returns" on the presidential election; b) failing to warn American voters that their votes were being tabulated with "trade secret," proprietary programming code in the new electronic voting systems, owned and controlled by two Bushite corporations; and c) stifling post-election protests and calls for investigation, in the face of overwhelming evidence of election fraud, and blackholing that story.

The leadership of the Democratic Party--including those who voted to give $4 BILLION to Bushite corporations for insecure, hackable, NON-TRANSPARENT voting systems--is equally guilty of failing to warn voters, and covering up the 2004 stolen election afterward. I have thought long and hard about this matter, and there is really no other conclusion that one can come to, except that powerful elements of the Democratic Party leadership WANTED George Bush to remain in office, to conduct THEIR MUTUALLY AGREED UPON WAR and all attendant crimes.

Bush and his crime family are bad news for sure. How could such a bunch of criminals, thieves and fascists gain power in this country? Not without the help of the New York Times and key parts of the Democratic Party establishment.

So Howell Raines can go !$@$#$* himself, as far as I'm concerned. He has a lot of nerve writing this NOW.

[Cooley Hurd]

6. K & R - also want to recommend Kevin Phillips' book:

American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush

I've said it before, I'll say it again: when the real story comes out about the Bush family, their Presidential Libraries will come down and they'll have to bury the fuckers in unmarked graves to keep people from defecating on them.

[laheina]

9. oooo!

I just put that one on my wish list. Thanks! :loveya:

[glitch]

11. Is it me? Or DU? This morning so many posts are making me ROFL

:spray:

Edit to add: btw, where is prescott buried?

[Raster]

12. facedown in unconsecreated ground with heads of garlic wedged in his mouth

[bridgit]

7. never willing to go there themselves, the bush family has been ever...

ready to sell you the pan you will die for, while panning for the gold they have already stolen believe it

[autorank]

10. Recommended...good lord, it's the "lizard people."

Have a blessed day;)

[Loonman]

13. Howell Raines can go pound sand

Fo enabling Jayson Blair to make the NYTs into a joke and sitting on the wiretap story until after the election.

FUCK Raines, and FUCK the NYTs.