We can only hope
“I don’t like him. I don’t
know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard. And I’m not too excited about
him being a leader.”
So
says George H.W. Bush about President Donald J. Trump in Mark K. Updegrove’s
soon-to-be-released, The
Last Republicans. And Bush Senior admits to having voted for
Hillary Clinton.
Neither is Bush Junior an
admirer of his successor. “Wow, this guy doesn’t know what it means to be
president.” W maintains that a president should not “exploit” and “incite”
anger, but “come up with ideas to deal with it.”
Junior states that he voted
for neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton.
Every American who ever
desired to know the truth about our political system should thank God for
Trump—regardless of whether or not they like him as a person or as a
politician. Trump’s candidacy and presidency have exposed the System in all of
its ugliness.
The Bushes are the proverbial
textbook illustration of this ugliness.
It is
now painfully obvious that the so-called “conservative movement” hadn’t been
anything of the sort from at least the time of Reagan. Rather, it has
largely been a neoconservative movement,
a species of soft or covert socialism and a cover for the Republican Party.
It is now painfully obvious
that both the Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt organizations
comprised of professional politicians that have labored indefatigably to
deceive American voters into thinking that the parties presented voters with a genuine
choice.
It is now painfully obvious
that D.C., and, thus, the country, is in fact led by a Mono-Party. The idea of
an “opposition party” is a politically-useful fiction that Democrats and
Republicans, like the Bushes, have long exploited in order to advance their own
interests, a fiction that proves especially handy during election season and,
of course, for fundraising purposes.
It is
now painfully obvious that there is but a single Regime, a
sprawling Government-Academia-Media-Entertainment (GAME) complex, i.e. The Big
GAME.
The Bushes typify the
phenomenon now known as “NeverTrump.” NeverTrumpers are Republicans, whether
politicians or pundits, who have stopped at nothing in their quest to sabotage
Trump.
For decades, Republicans,
like the Bushes, manipulated the unenthused and exacerbated among their base
into thinking that unless they continued voting for Republican candidates,
Armageddon would ensue: Don’t be an ideological purist! Don’t make the Perfect
the enemy of the Good! Remember Reagan’s “eleventh commandment!” Remember “the
[Bill] Buckley rule” about voting for the “most conservative” candidate when
confronted with a choice between two unappealing alternatives!
And so on, and so on.
However,
once it became clear that Donald Trump was a force with which to be reckoned,
these very same Republican politicians and
their propagandists in “conservative” media became
“NeverTrumpers.” As such, they not only refused to vote for the GOP
presidential nominee, but vowed to do everything and anything to insure that he
did not win the election.
To be
sure, NeverTrumpers are contemptible.
But they are contemptible, it is crucial to note, not because they refrained
from voting for Trump. NeverTrumpers are contemptible for having
refrained from voting for Trump after
decades of deceiving the base of their party into thinking that it is was
morally unacceptable for their constituents to refrain from voting for the
Bushes, the McCains, the Romneys, i.e. neoconservative candidates.
NeverTrumpers are
contemptible for their deceit, hypocrisy, and disloyalty to the millions of
Americans who supported them and their party since forever.
And there is no one more
eligible to be the posterchild for the Contemptible NeverTrumper than George W.
Bush.
After his supporters spent
eight years defending him against all manner of charges, but particularly the
charge that he was “racist,” Bush came out of retirement last month and
publicly impugned those very same folks of…“racism!” Granted, he didn’t
say this in so many words, but when he implicitly accused President Trump of
“nativism,” “bullying,” “prejudice,” “cruelty,” and “bigotry,” Bush indeed
implied that the over 60 million Americans who voted for Trump—many of whom
doubtless voted for Bush too—were guilty of these charges as well.
Against Trump, Bush remarked:
“Our identity as a nation…means that bigotry or white supremacy in any form is
blasphemy against the American creed.”
Now Bush, who uttered not a
peep during Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure in the White House, is criticizing
Trump once again.
Bear
in mind that this is the same President Bush who forced American taxpayers to
spend trillions of
dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that continue to the present day.
These wars were never
declared as such by Congress, and yet they have resulted in the loss of over a
million lives. Most of the dead consists of Middle Easterners, but
thousands of Americans have died in action as well. Thousands more have
had their lives forever changed, maimed psychologically and physically.
When the loved ones of soldiers are taken into account, it becomes clear that
many more thousands of Americans have been made to endure profound suffering
courtesy of Bush’s war.
At least as many as 800,000
Iraqi children have been orphaned because of Bush’s war. Ancient
Christian communities have been destroyed and other religious minorities have
been exposed to the predatory machinations of Islamic zealots.
It has been 14 years since we
invaded Iraq and 16 years since the invasion of Afghanistan—and yet these wars
drag on to the present day.
Let us not forget that the
incalculable pain, suffering, death, and bloodshed that is the Iraq War was
justified by Bush and his minions on the basis of a Big Lie, for there was
absolutely zero evidence that Saddam Hussein had any plans to attack America
with “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (the very notion is absurd on its face).
In
fact, and contrary to what the war’s apologists in the Bush administration, the
Deep State, Congress, and “conservative” media now claim, the intelligence that they presented
in their case for war had its share of astute—now prescient—critics from the
outset. Yet it was these critics who they either ignored or ridiculed or,
in at least one case, demonized as “unpatriotic.”
Bush’s
domestic policies were just as destructive to America’s well-being as was his
foreign policy of waging war against Third World countries. The Patriot
Act; No Child Left Behind; federal funding
for embryonic stem-cell research; and bailouts for the banking and automobile
industries were just some of the many lowlights of a presidency replete with
lowlights.
We
also mustn’t forget that the largest terrorist attack that had ever occurred on
American soil, 9/11,
as well as the worst financial crisis since the Depression both occurred on
Bush’s watch.
In Mark Updegrove’s new book,
Bush Junior laments that, as a result of Trump’s presidency, he may just be
prove to be “the last Republican President.”
Lovers of peace and liberty
the world over should pray without ceasing that Bush’s fear comes to pass.
If it does, they will have
something else for which to thank President Trump.
Jack Kerwick [send him mail]
received his doctoral degree in philosophy from Temple University. His area of
specialization is ethics and political philosophy. He is a professor of
philosophy at several colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com:
At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.
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