Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

There could be but one capstone to such a day, a perfect 300 bowling effort, and this young man informed all willing to listen to him that this is what occurred.

On one occasion when a group of the newspaper writers were joking about the tall tales this young man told an older member of the group who had already graduated from college and was beginning what proved to be a successful lifelong career covering sports at major newspapers initially in Los Angeles and later San Francisco provided mature insight to the picture that made an impression on my mind.  

Our older, more mature colleague revealed a belief that this individual might well have believed he had performed the aforementioned feats and others.  

A short time later he calmly told us that he would be a member of the Los Angeles City Council before he was thirty and believed that from there his success pattern would commence in the political arena.  He never reached the first pinnacle; needless to say any of the other anticipated future triumphs.

In observing individuals like this I have found that some in seeking to believe they have achieved certain lofty goals can convince themselves to at least a limited extent that their delusions are reality.  

The caveat to observe, however, is that they are also forced to wrestle with the uncomfortably real world.  They seek to run away from reality, the initial motivator in creating their fictitious world in the first place.

When George W. Bush was seen and heard the other day calmly telling reporters that he did not worry about his legacy because, after reading works on America's first president, another George with the last name of Washington, he learned that historian had not yet definitively decided what the final verdict should be on his stewardship.

Bush concluded in a calm, matter-of-fact tone that if historians after studying the nation's first president for two hundred years without being able to put his legacy into any kind of final perspective then the same would apply to him.  It might well be two centuries later before Bush's stewardship has been decided with any kind of finality, particularly as applied to the Iraq War.

Please note that Bush provided no specifics on which Washington biographies he read.  The claim harkened back memories to Bush's first presidential campaign of 2000, when campaign aides sought to present him as something more than an ill-informed, ill-equipped candidate and would-be president, as so many individuals both in and out of the political scene.

These aides made a terrible blunder in mentioning some specific names of books, notably a recently published biography of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.  One reporter in a one-on-one interview sought to grill Bush on the Acheson biography with embarrassment on the part of Bush resulting, not to mention his campaign aides as well.  

Just as it became quickly obvious then that Bush had not read the Acheson biography then, his absence of specifics and blanket categorization of historians undecided on Washington's place vividly reveal that Bush was making up alleged facts to self-serve during a tense and trying period.

During this period his national polling figures have plummeted to as low as 27 percent, even lower than those of Richard M. Nixon prior to his resignation in 1974.

The first major effort to evaluate American presidents on any kind of comprehensive scale extends back to the middle of the twentieth century.  From that time forward one figure remained an uncontroversial selection for greatness, generally occupying the number one position, that being George Washington.

Washington was removed from the kind of spirited debate accompanying figures seen in more of a political light such as Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Ronald Reagan.  Liberal historians applauded Washington for helping  launch a fledgling young democracy while conservatives were impressed by the stability he generated on behalf on a new nation he helped place on the right foot.

Bush has sought to make himself and others believe that his own day of reckoning lies far in the future, constructing a false premise of George Washington still under microscopic historical scrutiny.  

The fallacious Washington corollary segues into Bush's role in launching a war that Americans overwhelmingly want ended.  Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had no intention of engaging in any kind of reasoned analysis on whether or not America should attack Iraq and seek to drive its dictator Saddam Hussein from power.  

Rather than allow a United Nations inspection team complete its effort on the central issue of Saddam Hussein's weapons capability a rush to war was launched at a time when the Iraqi dictator under UN pressure was actually destroying weapons.

What happened after the efforts of Bush and Cheney were finally unmasked?  What happened when it was learned that a Middle East con man named Ahmed Chalabi had provided the information on Saddam's alarming weapons capability?  What occurred when the factionalism rife in Iraq that curbed George Bush the Elder from occupying Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War?

Without skipping a beat a George W. Bush who creates his own fictitious world and seeks to implement it all as fact, operating in concert with Cheney and assorted neocon propagandists such as William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, made two allied points relating to occupying Iraq:

1)That Saddam Hussein was a blood thirsty dictator who needed to be removed for the public good;

2)The stern opposition to the American occupation made it imperative to remain in Iraq since this is where the current war on terrorism was now being fought.

Saddam Hussein had come to power initially with active CIA support and the Reagan Administration, which neoconservatives held in such high reverence, supplied him with awesome firepower, extending to knowledge enabling the ruthless dictator to develop chemical weapons used against Iran and his own Kurdish population.

In reality, the neocon globalists, seeking Middle East hegemony and control over Iraq's lucrative oil fields, had decided that it was time for Saddam Hussein should go.  His usefulness to the neocons lay in the past and new constructs needed to be invented to justify immediate action, and were.

Bush, Cheney and the neocon global movement they represent sought to turn attention away from holding the attackers accountable for launching an aggressive preventive war that they conveniently mislabeled as pre-emptive.  To launch such an action without clear and convincing evidence that America faced imminent attack violated international law as established in the Nuremberg and United Nations codes.  

In addition to asserting that Saddam Hussein was nevertheless a bad man regardless of whether he possessed nuclear capability or not, this point was buttressed by the claim that the war on terrorism was now centered in Iraq.  Hence a link of 9/11, the embarkation point for various types of controversial actions, including trampling of the Bill of Rights, was made.

What was purposely left out of the equation was the distinction between a terrorist onslaught as opposed to a resistance movement.  Many of the same right wing voices that cited the domino effect in Vietnam without validation failed to see what was occurring in Iraq.

While corporate globalists from Halliburton and Bechtel invade Iraq and hot rhetoric is unleashed against Iran along with other Middle East nations, now it is the Arabs who are incorporating their own domino effect.  

Arabs see America as global occupiers with Iraq being only the initial thrust that neoconservatives seek to build upon.  Iran is spoken about with great frequency while other nations have been mentioned as well.  Alarmed Arabs see an advancing New World Order of neoconservatives seeking to wrest their own nations away from them.

As the "Big Brother" symbol that shrewder and more powerful individuals such as Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and others sought to manipulate from the beginning, George W. Bush, is the leader who claims to receive advice on important matters of state from no less than God.

Bush seeks to convince himself and others that all will be ultimately well in America and throughout the world if a strategy necessary to defeat the forces of terrorism is vigilantly employed.

Has Bush completely sold himself on his own delusional vision?  That is the question!

As in the case of others engaging in delusional behavior the answer is one count yes and the other count no.  While some who have met with him recently have commented on his serene manner, we have also seen an awkward and uncomfortable expression on his face at times when the camera's all-seeing eye zeroes in.

This look of fear and uncertainty has been labeled as Bush's "deer in the headlights" expression.  It surfaces on those occasions when his self-constructed wall of suffocating delusion is penetrated by the uncomfortable invasion of the truth.

On those occasions Bush is anything but serene.