In a perverse way, Bush is the perfect president

[DerekG]

When one takes into consideration that our country was founded on the greatest crime in modern history (the genocide of the Native Americans), prospered via slave labor and established and maintained its empire status through barbarous coups and interventions (read Blum's "Killing Hope" for the post-1945 horror show), and ruminate on the men who presided over and administered such ventures, then Bush seems less the aberration than he is the culmination of all that has come before. Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius--they've come and gone. Now, we've finally got our Nero.

I'd say we have the perfect president, blessed with none of the virtues of his forty-two predecessors, and plagued with all their vices. It's a thing of beauty, really. He's an amalgamation: harboring the Christian zeal of McKinley, the bloodlust of Teddy Roosevelt ("No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war"), the foolhardy idealism of Woodrow Wilson (who proved, with our plunge into the cauldron of Europe, that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions) and the showmanship of Ronald Reagan.

The rightward shift has certainly simplified things for us. No longer need we be conflicted with liberal militarists--just centrist ones. We don't have to expel from our minds the pictures of the scorched children of Japan and Korea, of Indonesia and Vietnam, in order to wax rhapsodic over the benevolent domestic visions of their respective killers: "Give 'em hell" Harry Truman and LBJ. There ain't no Fair Deals or Great Societies coming from the current batch of Vichy Democrats.

Bushco is completely, and entirely maleficent; I'm in awe of the perfect storm we have before us.