Is Bush Incompetent – Or The Last Resort?

(FP’ed 3:20 AM EDT, Thursday, October 11, 2007.

This question will be the defining question of the GWB Presidency…if we all survive the future. (spoken like a true ex-history teacher.)
– promoted by exmearden
)

I have to admit that as stupid as I sometimes portray Bush, I really have problems with the idea that he is incompetent.

I doubt that anyone incompetent has a chance of becoming president, unless they are so unbelievably stupid that they really can be just a hand puppet.

I think it would show publicly more than it does, and I doubt he’d be able to carry off his deceptive ‘just a dumb good ole boy’ act if he was that stupid.

Bush is a clown definitely, but I think stupid clown is a gross over-simplification.

Owning the World – The Great Illusion:

In the sixties and seventies, a group of right-wingers in the United States formed a society of vindictive and power hungry men who thought they could reinvent reality. Initially they received little notice and operated inside the American Enterprise Institute; that think tank became the womb for these megalomaniacs and their monstrous ambition of remaking the world. Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were among them and the movement was to turn into a preposterous beast…

As the group assumed greater visibility, they established their goal as the creation of an artificial world which the U.S. empire would rule single-handedly. Ignoring history, they were set on creating an illusory world, one where they alone would set the rules, decide who would run big corporations, who would dominate the world scene, who would control the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East and Central Asia, who would dictate the fate of the world – without taking into consideration the ambitions of the rest of the world or the aspirations of human beings. This virtual universe began to turn into a frightening reality decades later when these men managed to seize power. And they did this through manipulating the Supreme Court into appointing a clown as President, a marionette to serve as their front man. The clown didn’t have to do anything other than smirk and occasionally lift his hand in a fist; they knew that would be enough to impress the world and, in particular, the American people. Oh yes, and he would pretend to be one of the people, just like your cousin Dave or your next-door neighbor.

Joshua Muravchik, American Enterprise Institute:

We got lucky with Reagan. He took the path we wanted, and the policies succeeded brilliantly. He left office highly popular. Bush is a different story. He, too, took the path we wanted, but the policies are achieving uncertain success. His popularity has plummeted. It would be pigheaded not to reflect and rethink.

But we ought to do this without backbiting or abandoning Bush. All policies are perfect on paper, none in execution. All politicians are, well, politicians. Bush has embraced so much of what we believe that it would be silly to begrudge his deviations.

Calling Bush incompetent I think is making a too dangerous assumption.

Calling Bush incompetent I think might be dangerously minimizing and masking real and deeper issues:

Absolutely convinced we possess the right to pursue our “happiness” and “security”, regardless of the cost to the Earth and the rest of its sentient inhabitants, we US Americans are in a race to hoard the most toys, to eat the most food, to have the most orgasms, to be the best looking, and to be the biggest winners as we engage in a repugnant orgy of narcissistic and gluttonous hedonism.

We wage war perpetually, strip the world bare like a swarm of locusts, and give virtually nothing in return. Ensuring our “happiness” and “security” extracts a tremendous price from the rest of the Earth.

Since it rose to military and economic hegemony at the close of World War II, the United States, its proxies, an array of US-installed ruthless reactionary tyrants, and the World Bank have worked in concert to slaughter, torture, and impoverish untold millions of human beings in the “developing world” in an endless quest to satiate our plutocracy’s insatiable thirst for power and treasure.

Bush, his henchmen, and their multitude of war crimes are not anomalies.

Who will provide the grand design?

What is yours and what is mine?

Cause there is no more new frontier

We have got to make it here

We satisfy our endless needs and

Justify our bloody deeds,

In the name of destiny and the name

Of god

And you can see them there,

On Sunday morning

They stand up and sing about

What its like up there

They call it paradise

I don’t know why

You call someplace paradise,

Kiss it goodbye

“The Eagles – The Last Resort”



Cross-posted from Edgeing

30 comments

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    • Edger on October 11, 2007 at 00:33
      Author
  1. Satanic, not incompetent.

    • pfiore8 on October 11, 2007 at 04:39

    and certainly Clinton fortified the bridge between Reagan and Bush with the telecommunications act and nafta…

    i can only think that if cheney and rumsfeld can do it, so can we, but in reverse

    it’s just we have to believe we can overtake these motherfuckers

    • pfiore8 on October 11, 2007 at 04:41

    to agree on how foolish and dangerous it is to think bush is an idiot

    he is a ceo who tells cheney: this is what i was hired to produce, now you figure out how to make it happen

    bush is in on it all… but he’s so fucking non-dimensional

    and i think he’s drinking… look at him… i’m not saying it to be funny, i mean it

    • Twank on October 11, 2007 at 12:10

    I keep saying to myself that I will simply STOP posting comments to these essays/diaries/comments/whatever until they transform from “convincing people that REAL shit is happening” to “and THIS is what, on a day to day basis, we will DO to make things better”, but here I am, typing again.

    OK, here we go.  So what do we DO about it, and WHEN, ALREADY ?!!!!!!!!

    (Why can’t I just fucking shut up?)

    • Edger on October 12, 2007 at 05:00
      Author

    The Psychedelic 60s Literary Tradition and Social Change
    University of Virginia, April 26, 2000
    [video here – – – – –  transcript here]

    How do we know we’re warriors? How do we know who we are? We do, we do. Go ahead and brighten up that little spark in your life. Brighten it up and when you see each other there, don’t turn away from each other. When some guy on the street needs money, give him some damn money. We can afford it. Lay a couple of bucks on him and then meet his eyes; deal with him. This is what most of them want is just to have that human touch. And we don’t have to have master’s degrees or big houses. We can do it with funny clothes on. We look at each other and say, “Have a nice day,” and mean it, fucking mean it right down from where you are say, “Have a nice day.” The person looks back and your face lights up and then already you are having a better day. This is where it’s gonna run from.

    I’ve got a good black friend. I’ve known him for 30 years. He’s a jazz player, he talks a lot of jazz stuff. And often we will get into this argument and people will come out and say, “Yeah but look how many people are doing it. Look how many voted for it.” But that has to do with numbers. We are never going to win by numbers. There are not enough of us. We are strong, but there are not enough for us to win a huge popular election. We are losers. Face it from the beginning, you don’t have to deal with it later. We are dead ass losers, and yet it’s a wonderful game to be in there fighting for that place on the block. And so my friend says, “You can count the number of seeds in an apple, but you can’t count the number of apples in a seed.” We are the seeds.



    • Twank on October 12, 2007 at 05:00

    Not going to get angry … mad … whatever.  Never does ANY good.  I’m a planner, a doer.  Watch over time, I’ve been at it for over a year.  Don’t ask, just watch. 

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