The Regime's embrace of religious and cultural fundamentalism
resembles an ideological stance of unbending zeal and moral certitude,
encompassing the whole of reality.
Taken together, these traits present a formidable picture of a
thoroughgoing ideological juggernaut, well-plated with philosophical,
academic, legal and theological armor.
But underneath all this bristling array there is nothing but a tiny
white maggot of greed, wriggling and gorging on scraps of rotting
meat.
No deep beliefs or high ideals inform the Bushist ethos, which can be
boiled down to one sentence:
Grab your pile and screw anybody who gets in the way.
http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2004/11/26/120.html
Global Eye
By Chris Floyd
There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of George
W. Bush's further lurch to the Right since he limped over the election
finish line with his tiny, 1 percent, fraud-marred majority.
And to be sure, the wholesale purges he has instituted throughout his
regime -- replacing a slew of merely cringing sycophants with
cringing, drooling, groveling sycophants -- will indeed hasten the
United States' degeneration into corpo-religious authoritarianism
along the lines of Franco's Spain.
But all the earnest disquisitions about Bush's Franco-U.S. "ideology"
entirely miss the point -- and increase the fog that the Regime
deliberately spreads over its true interests.
For the heart of this slouching beast is neither left-wing nor
right-wing; it's strictly Bush-wing.
Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the Bush dynasty
knows what makes these preppy puppies run -- and it has nothing to do
with conservative principles or moral values or national security or
world freedom.
It's not ideology, but investments -- the gobbling up of unearned,
risk-free lucre on the grandest scale imaginable.
Naturally, the pursuit of this kind of piratical wealth leads to
certain kinds of policies that can at times be mistaken for a
political philosophy.
For example, the Bush Regime's devotion to Big Oil, the military, tax
cuts, corporate deregulation and unbridled executive power could be
seen as the expression of a coherent, if repellent, worldview:
Social Darwinism -- survival of the fittest, might makes right, winner
takes all.
Likewise, the Regime's embrace of religious and cultural
fundamentalism resembles an ideological stance of unbending zeal and
moral certitude, encompassing the whole of reality.
Taken together, these traits present a formidable picture of a
thoroughgoing ideological juggernaut, well-plated with philosophical,
academic, legal and theological armor.
But underneath all this bristling array there is nothing but a tiny
white maggot of greed, wriggling and gorging on scraps of rotting
meat.
No deep beliefs or high ideals inform the Bushist ethos, which can be
boiled down to one sentence:
Grab your pile and screw anybody who gets in the way.
War, energy and corporate finance just happen to be where the money is
at.
And raw, secretive political power -- unfettered by courts, laws,
legislators or public scrutiny -- is the most effective way to
safeguard and augment these investments.
That is not to say that the Bushist credo lacks all nuance.
There is in fact a very important refinement to their wormy greed:
Loot should always be obtained without the slightest risk to your own
financial position.
The "free market" must be shunned at all costs -- and manipulated by
string-pulling, deceit and intimidation when competition is
unavoidable.
Thus the Bush model is to cozy up to governments -- preferably
strongman regimes free to ladle out public money to their favorites
with no questions asked.
That's why Bush patriarch Prescott, pa and grandpa to presidents,
invested heavily in Nazi war industries throughout the 1930s -- and
kept on investing even after the German war machine was grinding
through Europe.
That's why George I made his mogul bones by pumping oil with
repressive royals in Kuwait.
Later, when he had a government of his own to play with, George sent
U.S. troops to bail out his Kuwaiti partners after another of his
business clients, Saddam Hussein, got too frisky in a border dispute.
George I would end his career as a corporate bagman, roaming the Earth
in search of insider deals and choice "privatizations" from Saudi
princes, Asian dictators, African tyrants, South American sleaze
merchants and Europork peddlers.
George II's murky road to fortune was likewise paved with insider
trading, no-risk loans and mysterious infusions of foreign cash,
including a bailout from a firm embedded in the octopus of BCCI -- the
renegade banking cartel that the U.S. Senate called the "largest
criminal organization in world history," which cloaked drug deals,
gun-running, nuke trafficking and "black ops" by the CIA and other
intelligence services behind a protective wall of bribes that reached
into nearly every government on Earth.
Of course, the best of all possible worlds is controlling the
government yourself -- and Dubya has certainly raised crony capitalism
to dizzy heights, tearing down whole countries just so his investor
pals (and his family) can reap the profits of "reconstruction."
But again, it is the maggoty hankering for easy money that truly
drives Bushist militarism, not any kind of ideological or religious
vision.
For such crude minds, the surest way to guarantee that floods of
public boodle keep pouring into your private pocket is to scare the
hell out of people and keep them scared with war and rumors of war.
The decidedly un-butch Bushes are not really bloodthirsty.
They don't sit in dark corners and cackle over the idea of children
being chewed to pieces by American bombs.
Nor do their nostrils flare with righteous rage at the thought of
homosexuality or abortion or nipples on national television.
It's just that war profiteering, corporate rapine and cynical
pandering to the public's worst instincts are the easiest way to get
the unearned riches they crave -- and the perks and power they feel
are their birthright as an ancient branch of the American aristocracy.
Perhaps if they could obtain these same privileges as easily by other,
less horrific means, they would.
As it is, they take the world as they find it, and go about their
business without fretting over the consequences -- the dead, the
ruined, the spreading hate, the poisoned planet.
Why should they care?
As the maggot cannot see beyond the meat, so too these men of
greed-stunted understanding can see nothing of worth outside their own
bottomless appetites.
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Harry
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