By now it should be well known by the lucky readers of these erudite pages that Dragon City Journal has little more than contempt for George W. Bush and his minions. Nor are we are not very big on the idiots (read Republicans) who support him. He is reviled everywhere and, in poll after international poll, he comes up like something smelly that the world wants to scrape off the bottom of its shoe. Increasingly Bush seems more like a man who lives in his own world of self-delusion where Orwellian “newspeak” is the language of discourse between him and a tight cabal of sycophants who shield him from reality.
Bush has had public moments where he has appeared to exhibit signs of derangement, not just in his speech, but in the scowls, jerky body language, and eyes that dart and seem to stare into space. We won’t speculate further on this, but rather on another aspect of this man’s personality, one that seems equally as distressing for a man in apposition of such power, a power that he has sorely abused. We are speaking of what some people refer to as a “cruel streak” in the man. Elsewhere, we have spoken of his cowardice, of his being coddled through school and in his special treatment in his so-called military service. These are behavioral elements of privilege that are sometimes associated with personalities that exhibit attitudes from insensitivity to outright cruelty to others.
So, why make this indictment? Well, let’s put together the b ill of particulars. We will begin with what triggered this piece; an announcement by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he may be removing all British troops from Iraq by the end of 2008 and , that he will grant asylum to all Iraqi interpreters who worked with British forces, because interpreters, and their families have been marked for assassination and are defenseless. This contrasts with the Bush Administration’s practice of leaving their interpreters hanging out there. Mr. Bush has granted only about 100 Iraqis in such danger asylum in the good ole US of A. Such a callous disregard of the safety of people who have risked their lives for America is an insult to our reputation as a country that cares about human rights. Use ‘em and lose’em seems to be George Bush’s attitude.
So now we can back up a bit and recognize that we might have seen this coming. Back to when George Bush was governor of Texas, the capitol of capital punishment, where, in spite of the amount of evidence that courts tend to inflict this more on minorities and that DNA evidence should be used wherever possible, George kept the lethal chemicals flowing in those arms. He has never showed signs of doubt or regret.
Some might object to our bringing tax policies into this, but we regard the drain of wealth in the country into the pockets of the rich and the corporations as an act of social insensitivity that borders on cruelty. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth George just doesn’t see it that way. The number of people slipping below the poverty line, into homelessness and without health care doesn’t seem to matter much if energy, pharmaceutical and defense profits are down.
Need a recent example of this. For the cost of five weeks of his Iraq war, we could have provided health care for thousands of children without it for five years. Bush vetoed the bill (passed with the assistance of several republicans) because he doesn’t want government involved in health care (ahem, Medicare). Better to invoke a principle that even he doesn’t keep when it comes to the defense industry, and screw the children.
And those damn kids better not get any diseases that might be cured by stem-cell research, George says, because he isn’t going to support using stem cells, even those that are being discarded any way, from making this into a nation that tortures little cells because this sounds to fundamentalist Christian idiots like . . .
. . . Abortion. So those female kids that make it to puberty without health care had better not get pregnant—even from rape—because George is opposed to abortion under any circumstances. So girls need to go ahead and have those kids; they can get health care (including prosthetic limbs) when the volunteer for the Armed Forces. See, who says George isn’t a “compassionate conservative”? [1]
We will recall, too, that George didn’t seem to compassionate when there were big crises. Remember him sitting in that kindergarten when his aides kept coming in and telling him that planes were crashing into the World Trade Center? George just sat there until they flew him around for a couple days and it was time to turn up with a bull-horn for his photo op. He kept his record of cruel indifference intact with that memorable fly-by of the Katrina disaster, a whole day after he played around with photo ops with military people in San Diego. [2] Rather than getting the National Guard and other assistance to places where the press seemed to be able to access, George made excuses, and to the world we looked like Darfur with too much water, but just as much cruelty.
Finally, we come to cruelty that even a Red State Republican might recognize as such. John McCain even recognizes it; he certainly remembers it. [3] Head-slapping, [4] temperature extremes, water-boarding, Abu Ghraib—hey what’s a little interrogation, when the safety of America is in the balance? Never mind that torture is not what America is about. What’s wrong with ignoring the Geneva Conventions, what’s wrong with torturing (ooops!) some detainees, who haven’t even been charged and are kept from having legal representation andhabeas corpus rights?
And where is the concern from this president for the innocent Iraqis killed by Marines in Haditha, and by his Blackwater mercenaries in the streets of Baghdad? There is no outrage at the cruel fates visited upon these people. Only denial and silence, as if they don’t matter. This is the opposite of “compassionate conservatism”; this is cowardly cruelty .
Bush is correct in one thing: He claims that “American does not torture people.” He’s right;he does . But if America does not want to feel the revenge for Bush’s torture, it had damn well better wake up and do something about him. He will continue to deny that he engages in torture, making us all culpable for allowing him to do it. He should be impeached, but, first, maybe a little water-boarding would get him to – finally – tell the truth.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.10.2007)
[1] Well, a whole bunch of military people who have seen their benefits cut, for starters. But if you do get a prosthetic limb, you mjight get a photo op with the President.
[2] His appointment of (“Your’re doin’ a heckuva job”) Brownie can’t be called an act of cruelty. Stupidity, yes.
[3] Bush was pretty cruel with McCain, too, when he was party to the dirty racial trick of implying that McCain’s adopted daughter was the product of an interracial tryst. Just like daddy Bush and his Willie Horton ad in his own campaign against Dukakis. The acorn doesn’t fall too far from the tree.
[4] I wrote to a lawyer friend about the Alberto Gonzales torture memos. He wrote back and said: “What’s wrong with a little head slapping?” I wrote back asking if I could gently slap his head, for ten minutes, every fifteen minutes for a month. Just as a test to see if he would retract his statement. But he hasn’t taken me up on it. Just gently, mind you.