When he's not globetrotting with rightwing bagman and arms-dealing cult godling Sun Myung Moon, or being served with free prostitutes while bagging Red Army cash and insider fixings in China, little presidential brother Neil Bush can often be found in the balmy climes of Saudi Arabia, soaking up the largess of Bush Family business partners like the royal Sauds and the wealthy bin Ladens -- and peddling his latest business wheeze, a boondoggle aimed at wringing money from public education systems dependent on government favor to survive...
Thus Arab News, the Saudi English-language paper, finds the peripatetic Neil "building bridges" at the Jeddah Economic Forum this week...
He only really came to life at the end of the talk, speaking of the "anguish" he feels over the way the Saudi's medieval kingdom of rampant nepotistic corruption, intolerant religious extremism and suffocating social and political repression is portrayed in the outside world.
To Bush, the fact that Saudi Arabia is a kleptocratic authoritarian oligarchy dominated by a single family whose power rests on a "base" of religious fanatics and oil money is not a bad thing; it's just a "different" kind of democracy...
The Saudi way of governance obviously has much to recommend it, especially to superior families -- the natural rulers of society -- who find that the prissy restrictions and public clamor of Western-style Jeffersonian representative democracy tends to put a crimp in the efficient exercise of their power.
P.S. For more on the highly remunerative relationship between the Bush Family and the mephitic messiah from Korea, see Robert Parry's "Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'" and his archive of stories on "The Dark Side of Rev. Moon," plus John Gorenfeld's continuing updates on the bizarro GOP moneybags.
Chris being on something of a roll this week- basically, Chris is always on a roll if you ask me- elaborates on some of Arthur Silber's work. Let's face it, the Bu$h family is nothing if not a pack of enduring idiots.
...Arthur Silber, as always, talks good and damning sense about the maddening moral idiocy of the entire American establishment and the whole "national debate" about the Iraq war. He limns with brutal accuracy the inability of our movers and shakers -- and most of the public they manipulate so thoroughly -- to comprehend the true nature of this bloodsoaked hell: that it is a monstrous crime, conceived in evil, steeped in murder, breeding death, brutality and corruption in everything it touches:
"Moreover, this catastrophe without end has severely damaged our nation's military, making us more vulnerable to actual threats we might face in the future. And no, Mr. Bush, Senator Reid, and assorted "major liberal bloggers," the answer is not to enthusiastically and very expensively create a still "bigger military." We already spend more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined. Why in God's name should our military, in the words of Chalmers Johnson, regularly "deploy[] well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations" -- and why should we have over 700 bases in 130 countries around the globe? There is only one reason for insanity of this kind: we are absolutely convinced we are "entitled" to rule the world, by military force on a scale never before seen in all of world history. If that is what you believe, then say so -- and be damned."
That last line says it all. It's time to stop all the baby talk, time to strip off the sugar-coating over the reality of what these policies really mean, and have always meant. And it's time -- way past time -- to damn the authoritarians, the imperialists, and the silk-suited murderers for what they are, and drive them out of office, out of public life, and into the prisons where they belong.
Nice idea. But who among us can bell the cats?
Chris goes on to quote Silber again:
"The truth is infinitely worse than that these lives have been "wasted": these deaths have served to strengthen our enemies and weaken our own country in countless ways that our actual enemies could never have achieved on their own. That these lives have been "wasted" is the best one can say, not the worst. They are the greatest boon our enemies could dream of. These lives have not been "wasted": they are the precious tribute laid at the feet of our enemies, by our own leaders in the pursuit of indefensible and criminal aims.
Of course, the recognition of this truth requires that we act like adults, and that we are capable of coherent thought, shorn of lies. We must be willing to give up the myth of the "noble soldier" who "selflessly sacrifices" his life for the glory of the Perfect and Good United States -- and see that these individuals died in a criminal war of aggression launched to consolidate and expand America's hegemonic role, a goal embraced by almost every leading politician, Republican and Democratic, over many decades of entirely avoidable conflict, chaos and death."
Oh: and by the way, I guess this makes me yet another uncivil extremist. As if no one could tell.
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