| Five Things
That Are Revealed By Democrats’ Rehabilitation Of Bush
By Caitlin
Johnstone
May 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- George W Bush is
in the news again today, and once again it’s not for
the only legitimate reason that he should ever be in the
news, namely a war crimes tribunal. No, it’s because his
voice was used in a cutesy feel-good video about unity
during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Let us remember how
small our differences are in the face of this shared
threat,” Bush is heard saying. “We are not partisan
combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and
equally wonderful in the sight of God.”
And, needless to say, Democrats are all over social
media orgasming in their pants about it.
“This video made me ugly cry,”
tweeted actress-turned-McResistance pundit Alyssa
Milano.
“A REAL president,”
tweeted the other Alyssa Milano, Debra Messing.
“In a million years I never thought I’d be crying
watching this, thinking how much better we’d all feel if
Bush were president today,”
tweeted former Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill
to thunderous online applause.
The Intercept‘s Mehdi Hasan
spent all day on Twitter defending his position that
Dubya is superior to Trump, at one point even
arguing “You can be a sane warmonger. You can be a
warmonger but be an ok human being to your friends and
family. You can be a warmonger and be able to handle a
domestic public health crisis.”
For years rank-and-file Democrats have been
giving the true Butcher of Baghdad
a majority approval rating, running with
the common narrative that while Bush
perhaps made some “mistakes”, Trump is
spectacularly worse. Here are five things
that are highlighted by that common
perspective:
|
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
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1. It shows how little
Democrats care about the lives of human
beings overseas.
By the end of his first term Bush had
launched two full-scale ground invasions,
murdered a million Iraqis, destabilized an
entire region in a way that would shortly
give rise to ISIS, and ushered in a whole
new level of unprecedented US military
expansionism and imperialism. Trump has done
none of these things. He has
inflicted many evils upon our world and,
like Obama, has
continued and expanded the warmongering
of his predecessors. But he has done nothing
that rises to the level of depravity of
Bush’s wars.
The fact that Democrats see Trump’s evils
as not only equal to but far in excess of
Bush’s reveals as plain as day that, for all
their supposed bleeding heart liberal
sensibilities, they simply do not place much
value on the lives of foreigners. Sure they
might enjoy a little masturbatory melodrama
over kids in cages when it shows up on their
doorstep, but kids getting ripped to shreds
by cluster bombs and being born severely
disabled from depleted uranium munitions
simply does not register for them, because
they don’t have to look at it.
They do not care. Rude tweets and racism
are worse than institutionalized mass murder
for them, because they have to look at one
but not the other.
2. It shows that Trump-era Democrats are
Bush-era Republicans.
“Dems have no choice but to rehabilitate George Bush
because their core narrative is the US was a
fundamentally good and decent land before Trump
vandalized it,” journalist Glenn Greenwald
tweeted in response to Democrats’ fawning over Bush,
adding, “How do you join with Bill Kristol, Nicole
Wallace, Rick Wilson, David Frum and the CIA without
whitewashing Bush’s crimes?”
Indeed, Bush-era neocons have been able to fully
ingratiate themselves to and integrate themselves with
Democrats in the age of Trump by posing as moral
opposition longing for a more civilized time when
presidents would politely butcher humans by the hundreds
of thousands without using offensive language like “shit
hole”. A gentlemanly time for gentlemanly presidents to
unfold gentlemanly torture and surveillance policies all
around the world without posting rude tweets about
celebrities they don’t like.
Trump-era Democrats are Bush-era Republicans. That’s
how far to the authoritarian right the party has moved
in the last few years on important matters like foreign
policy. You can see this by the shrieking, hysterical
response they had to Tulsi Gabbard calling for what more
or less amounted to a simple reversion back to pre-9/11
US foreign policy. It has been necessary for Democrats
to gaslight themselves into this position because for
three presidential campaigns in a row–Obama 2012,
Clinton 2016, and now Biden 2020–they’ve had to find
ways of convincing themselves that a politician who has
facilitated Bush’s foreign policy agendas would make a
good commander-in-chief.
3. It shows how the amnesia-inducing effects of the
mass media news churn make it difficult to retain
perspective.
Mass media propagandists are able to distort
perception even while telling the truth using
the news churn memory hole. Even when forced to
report on uncomfortable truths like not finding any
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the fact that the
occupation of Afghanistan has been justified by an
entire generation of lies, the memory of that reporting
can be made to fade into the background by frantically
reporting on what’s happening right now without
referring back to the previous revelations.
Russiagate alone did so much to distort people’s
perceptions in mainstream liberal circles. Having the
baseless narrative breathlessly promoted year after year
after year that the Kremlin had literally seized control
of the highest levels of the US government left
rank-and-file Democrats who subscribed to it without any
sense of scale or proportion, because they were
constantly being told that the Most Important Thing Ever
was about to happen. How can you hold perspective on a
million dead Iraqis when you’re being told day after
day, year after year in myriad ways that Russian Hitler
was controlling your country but Super Mueller is going
to swoop in to the rescue any minute now? It would be
very difficult.
4. It shows the glaring difference between fact and
narrative.
Most of the mass media reporting on Trump has been
factual, it’s just had a ton of narrative spin attached
to the facts. It is a fact that Trump frequently says
and does dumb, obnoxious and horrible things. It is a
fact that many racists think he’s the cat’s pajamas. It
is a fact that there was an impeachment and a collusion
investigation. But the narrative overlay that has been
heaped upon those facts while they’re being reported–the
urgency, the alarmism, the hyperbole–leaves viewers with
the distinct impression that this US president is awful
in a way that is unique and historically unprecedented,
and he simply isn’t.
Trump is not worse than Bush, the mass media just
yell about him a lot more. If the narratives matched the
facts, mass media consumers would be aware that nothing
Trump has done is as evil as Bush’s invasion of Iraq
alone. In reality Trump didn’t wind up being another
Hitler, he wound up being another Obama (not a
compliment). And if the narrative spin matched the
factual reality, people would understand that.
5. It shows that this simply is not
working.
Imagine you’re
out in the woods with a friend you trust in the dark.
You know there’s a horrible monster out there stalking
you, and suddenly you hear it in the distance coming
crashing towards you. It has picked up your scent and it
will be upon you in moments.
You turn to
run, but your friend grabs you and won’t let you move.
He falls to the ground grabbing your legs screaming “No!
No! We must stay here! We mustn’t move an inch!”
Who do you need
to fight first? The monster? Or your “friend”?
That’s why I
focus so much of my criticism on the Democratic Party
instead of the Republicans. Ultimately they’re the party
which could actually allow for positive changes to be
made to the world, but instead they keep moving further
and further into the warmongering totalitarianism they
once purported to despise in George W Bush.
Relying on
either head of the two-headed one-party system to make
meaningful changes simply is not working, and will not
ever work. No institution that would so warmly
rehabilitate and welcome a bloodthirsty monster like
Bush is going to help humanity one iota. In fact, its
sole purpose is to do the exact opposite.
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