George Bush, that’s who.
Sidney Blumenthal in Salon, although he’s actually discussing General Petraeus’ performance before Congress in the light of Richard Draper’s aurhorised Bush biography, incidentally puts the blame where it really lies – on George Bush Sr.’and his pretensions to aristocracy..
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The elder Bush assumed that the Bush family trust and its trustees — James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Prince Bandar — would take the erstwhile wastrel and guide him on the path of wisdom. In this conception, the country was not entrusted to the younger Bush’s care so much as Bush was entrusted to the care of the trustees. He was the beneficiary of the trust. But to the surprise of those trustees, he slipped the bonds of the trust and cut off the family trustees. They knew he was ill-prepared and ignorant, but they never expected him to be assertive. They wrongly assumed that Cheney would act for them as a trustee.
Cheney had worked with and for them for decades and seemed to agree with them, if not on every detail then on the more important matter of attitude, particularly the question of who should govern. The elder Bush had helped arrange for Cheney to become the CEO of Halliburton, making him a very rich man at last. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft et al. didn’t realize that Cheney’s apparent concurrence was to advance himself and his views, which were not theirs. When absolute power was conferred on him, the habits of deference lapsed, no longer necessary. (“Thank you for the privilege of serving today.”) Cheney was always more Rumsfeld oriented than Bush oriented. The elder Bush knew that Rumsfeld despised him and that Cheney was close to Rumsfeld, just as he knew his son’s grievous limitations. But the obvious didn’t occur to him — that Cheney would seize control of the lax son for his own purposes. The elder Bush committed a monumental error, empowering a regent to the prince who would betray the father. The myopia of the old WASP aristocracy allowed him to see Cheney as a member of his club. Cheney, for his part, was extremely convincing in playing possum. The elder Bush has many reasons for self-reproach, but perhaps none greater than being outsmarted by a courtier he thought was his trustee.
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Yes, George Bush Sr, former president, was tossing around the future of not just millions of US citizens but the whole bloody world as though it were a family bauble to be disposed of on a whim. That’s just how entitled George Bush Sr. feels to power. Morals mean nothing, law means nothing, treason means nothing.
That’s because to the super-rich, the rest of us barely exist. What exists to them is money and power, not people and their annoying laws and rights. We’re just another annoying thing, we have no rights, unless they grant them to us from their beneficence. We are, at best, a necessary inconvenience. When we’re an unnecessary inconvenience… well, we’re screwed.
George Sr. and wife Barbara, their egos inflated to superimportance by years of Republican sycophancy to money, planned on Bushco being in power forever. They thought their patented child-rearing techiques had produced the ideal useful tool they could use.
But instead they’ve made a psychopathic monster that neither they nor anyone else can control. Now millions are dead, maimed or homeless and they are to blame.
I hope Bush Sr., who professes to Christianity, can’t sleep nights for guilt at what he’s done and I hope it’s sharper than a serpent’s tooth; I hope it’s a slow insinuating poison in his soul (should such a thing exist and should he have one).
It continues to amaze me that so very little public anger is turned his way: even notorious narcotic-loving nymphet Lindsey Lohan’s weirdo Dad probably gets more critical column inches than does the former president.
No doubt there are those who’d say, “They’re old now, what does it matter? They’ll be dead soon enough”, but just because Bush Sr. and his loathsome wife are old and infirm shouldn’t mean they’re absolved of any crimes against humanity.
Take Romania’s Ceaucescus and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, for example; age didn’t spare them. Nor should it have, and neither should it spare George or Barbara Bush.
