http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com/2012/02/george-w.html
My friend JoAnn recently e-mailed me some unbelievably grim statistics — and also a question. “There are currently two million orphans in Afghanistan, as well as five million orphans in Iraq. How many years of war does it take to produce that many orphans?” http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2012/02/08/exp-bs-namdar-afghan-roadtrip.cnn, and http://www.alternet.org/world/70886/?page=entire
And speaking of orphans, I’m currently reading a murder mystery about serial killers — wherein the author states that once someone becomes a serial killer, that person pretty much stays on this particular chosen career path for the rest of his life. And this rather grim concept immediately got me to thinking about George W. Bush, a man who could never resist killing people. Is he too still up to his old tricks? Or has he finally reformed? I wonder.
According an extremely “softball” interview with Bush in AARP magazine last year, GWB is now just a well-meaning average guy with a big smile, innocently puttering around in his garden. http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/newsmakers/info-11-2010/george-bush-interview.html;andstart/0/filter/:/:/;andstart/0/filter/:/:/;andstart/0/filter/:/:/;andstart/0/filter/:/:/.html
Yeah right.
GWB is just your smiling average guy — with just one small exception. Bush is personally responsible (along with his smiling father, Pappy’s smiling friends and George’s smiling successors) for creating SEVEN MILLION orphans in Afghanistan and Iraq. And that’s not even counting all the orphans that he (and Pappy Bush, Slick Willie, Dick Cheney and Barak Obama) have paid others create in Palestine, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, etc. — not to mention the rest of the world. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMvPlkyBOBQ
I immediately canceled my subscription to AARP.
But my question about this particular serial killer still remains. What, exactly, is GWB up to these days? Is he really trying to resist the temptation to go out and create even more orphans? Or is he now finally able to rest comfortably — knowing that his successor is still keeping up that fast-track scheme of orphan-creation for him.
Perhaps even at this very moment, our George is happily thinking to himself as he sings in the shower, “Iran has WMDs too. We really do need to bomb Iran and create even more orphans. Guess I’d better give Barry a call.”
PS: And what about all the orphans that Bush, his colleagues and successors are happily creating here in America too? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PE5V4Uzobc
PPS: And this is still my favorite bumper-sticker: “Imagine a world where EVERY child is wanted, nurtured, protected and loved: World Peace in one generation!”
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Anonymous just gave the NSA a well-deserved tongue-lashing. Good for them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFL6uD_2ODM
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From BartCop [Yeah and why isn’t the GOP trying to regulate Viagra and Cialis too?]:
I’m going to take the opposite side here and say that Bush isn’t the real killer – yes, I know that’s hard to digest but bear with me here…
The reality of war is that it’s not individuals who want to start them so much as *interests* that seek to gain from them – in the case of the present Middle Eastern conflicts those interests would be the oil companies (for self-explanatory reasons), the MIC (wide-scale conflicts mean opportunities for profit in sales of arms and military equipment) and the Israel lobby (which pays Washington big bucks to keep Arab states on the defensive), but ultimately they do not have the power to wage war in the region by themsleves: so they court the authorities that control the monopoly on force (i.e. the state) and persuade them to go to war on their behalf (via massive bribes) – and the state in turn does the wages the actual war and does the killing for their profit.
Keep in mind that the persons who fill the positions of power are not relevant at all – each individual is just a cog in a much larger machine, so removing one cog (or even all of them) and replacing it with another will yield the same result due to the manner in which the machine is designed: ergo, there would have been a wide-scale war in the Middle East with or without Bush – if Bush didn’t sign the order, some one else filling his office would have because that’s how the machine functions!
In conclusion, Bush did not create those orphans – the state did and the interests that lobbied for war are accomplices. Any individual that killed so many people would be condemned as a “murderer,” but since the state has the power to define the very concept of “murder” itself no killing it approves of will ever be treated as a “murder” (thus the reason there’s no death penalty, or any penalty for that matter, for killings carried out by the state).
I’m going to take the middle here because (!) I actually agree with Az but I don’t rule out the author’s stance as valid either. If one were to review the video of the 9/11 memorial service at the National Cathedral, there was Curious George (Bush Jr) looking serious and sincere for all of his IQ of a possible 90 .. striking a pose of manifest determination, this moron actually believed (and probably still believes) the ‘official’ line. And then .. Papa Bush, sitting beside his stupid as a fence post kid, suddenly pats Jr while leaning back in a brief episode of what can only be described as combined mirth/joy/exhilaration in a service commemorating 3,000 dead.
Bush Sr was never a stupid man in a sense of IQ, he apparently had never fried his brain on coke and alcohol. And the man is a killer par excellence in a leadership position where the CIA and corporate war profiteering vector throughout his career and beyond into retirement. I can see his explaining to Dick Cheney “Look Dick, we both know my kid is not the brightest bulb on the block, so he’s going to need a babysitter who does the heavy lifting. Now that is your job, we only need Jr to think he is calling the shots”
So what is the ‘state’ ? In fact it is presently a de facto cover for corporate killers, and in that case, both Georges’ are accountable were there a functioning rule of law but there is not. The same cabal of killers in a string of crimes going back to early post WWII with the Dulles brothers having hijacked the USA intelligence services on behalf of corporate boards, determines the rule of law only applies as a facade to cover their crimes. This is precisely why Attorney General Eric Holder sits on both hands rather than exercise the Criminal R.I.C.O [Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations] Act to clean out the rats nest.
The law is on the books but not exercised. The why of that is a subject could fill a very large set of books. The short story is, corporations have ‘punked’ democracy and people are indeed largely as bright as ‘sheep’
I think people are taught to be sheep. I think our kids learn how to be idiots at school. Morons are teaching them how. Some other assholes taught the morons how to teach kids to be stupid.
I think it’s really a grand feat to teach people to act like sheep. Especially on such a massive global scale. I applaud whoever did it.
Now does anyone know how to teach sheep how to act like people?
phd wrote “I applaud whoever did it” The whoever’s name was the American Edward Bernays who’d prostituted his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories to corporations, including the Dulles brother Chiquita Brands [nee United Fruit]
http://www.scribd.com/doc/58185081/On-Edward-Bernays-and-Propaganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Insofar as undoing the damage which has seen the average American IQ drop from a median 100-110 to 90-100 [pretty significant] .. well, good luck with that ..
@ phd,
“I think it’s really a grand feat to teach people to act like sheep. Especially on such a massive global scale. I applaud whoever did it.”
People have been conditioned for irrational loyalty and obedience to some power outside themselves since the dawn of civilization – hell, the entity called state *thrives* on this kind of unthinking devotion on the part of its slaves (oh, I’m sorry – “citizens”): as Ron pointed out it was Edward Bernays that brought mass mind control into the modern age, but the reality is that the idea of mass manipulation is as old as agriculture – Bernays just made the art of propaganda more scientific than it used to be.
“Now does anyone know how to teach sheep how to act like people?”
Much easier said than done – the “civilized” way of thinking has become very well ingrained into most people’s minds and the few that are still not “civilized” or have found a way to break out of the mold forced upon them by 21st. century society are demonized in the public eye (to the established order, those who won’t bow down to the new idol of the state are called “criminals” and “terrorists”) and the general population lacks the necessary tools to see through the propaganda becuase they’ve been brainwashed with a non-stop flow of misinformation from mainstream news outlets and their overall critical thinking skills have been impared by exposure to the mind-numbing shit that passes for “entertainment” anymore.
If you ask me, there’s just no hope for society as it presently exists – I fear that it will take the end of civilization as we know it to finally wake the masses from their media-induced slumber…
I don’t think there’s any way to turn sheep into people. But I think children can be taught how to not be sheep.
Although it might be really difficult as long as Snooki, Lady Gaga and John Cena are telling kids what to think.
When ignorant people have had kids in their possession for the five first years, the damage has already been done. You cannot overcome gross stupidity in the home .. there is no education will overcome that, so right again Az:
“there’s just no hope for society as it presently exists”
It WILL require ‘the end of civilization as we know it’ .. the question in my mind is how that end comes about. The possibilities might seem limited perhaps, but are not necessarily predetermined. It would seem if there were to be a bright future it would preclude stupid people and I’m not speaking of organic IQ .. the only thing I can think of as moronic as the religious right’s desire to blow the world up to precipitate the return of Jesus and in the meantime mow down ‘deviants’ (read intelligent people) in the process is, liberals who would be horrified at the idea of mowing down the religious right to save themselves because it would be ‘intolerant’ .. any mathematical genius out there want to tackle that equation?