Political Hot Spot

Monday, May 29, 2006

Another Bush in the White House?! Heaven help us all.

When I read this, I almost burst into tears at the horror.

"A Few Years, and Then Another Bush?

"Bush III? Or has the dynasty run its course?

"Those are the questions some Republicans are asking themselves as political talk bubbles up yet again about President Bush's brother Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and his interest in the White House. The chief driver of the mini-buzz is the current occupant of the White House, who has said twice this month that his younger brother would make "a great president."

"No one, the president included, is suggesting that the younger Bush will run in 2008, and Governor Bush, whose second term is up in January, has adamantly ruled it out. But Republican Party leaders continue to talk seriously about a continuation of the dynasty, a Bush III administration, with Jeb as a candidate in 2012 or 2016, when the memory of the current president's dismal poll ratings will be less of a factor. That, at least, is what happened the last time around: President George Bush's unpopularity at the end of his term in 1992 did not hurt his eldest son when he ran for president eight years later."

Is it even possible that America could be stuck with another Bush?! When Jeb came out strong on Terri Schiavo, I was almost certain that he had his eye on the White House, but I never thought that he would have a chance of making it there. Another Bush presidency would ruin this country for sure. As if Bush hasn't caused enough damage already, imagine 4 or, god help us 8 more years of another Bush. The thought is horrible and scary. Thank goodness he doesn't seem to want to run in 2008. Maybe we can get a Democrat in office who will reverse the damage the Bush administration has caused and set America on the right path. Will it be Gore? I have high hopes for him.

50 Comments:

  • At 5/29/2006 02:11:00 AM, Blogger The Future Was Yesterday said…

    From the article...."That, at least, is what happened the last time around: President George Bush's unpopularity at the end of his term in 1992 did not hurt his eldest son when he ran for president eight years later.
    Imo, as bad as the Bush horror show is, the memory of the public is even worse. That leads to another of my soapboxes; for all the screaming you hear now, the average voter doesn't really give a shit. As I read from one commenter but can't remember where, "I can't find a person now that says they voted for Bush. Yet 50.0000000001% of us did! WTH?"

     
  • At 5/29/2006 11:22:00 AM, Blogger Ellie said…

    seriously. What's wrong with the American people's memory? This reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. The "Party" tells the people one day that their chocolate ration has been cut and the next day they tell them that there is more chocolate than ever before, when the ration is still smaller that it was originally. The people just accept it and don't ask any questions. The American people are getting to be this accepting, and it's not good for our country.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 11:36:00 AM, Blogger celticfire said…

    The last 5 years have reminded me of 1984.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 06:28:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    The Republicans stole the elections.
    In Las Vegas during the vote, some people trashed the votes. This story was never reported to the mainstream medias (check on the Internet there are a few links).

    Anyway I don't think that the american voting system is democratic at all. We should elect directly a President and it's called "universal suffrage".

     
  • At 5/29/2006 06:44:00 PM, Blogger billie said…

    i can't believe that the bad taste of this administration would allow a third time's a charm bush back in the white house- except maybe 'p' when he is old enough. jeb has too many skeletons- as do the rest of dubya's brothers. one bush you can forget- i mean want to forget- but at the end of two terms of the bush legacy- no freakin' way. forgetful or not.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 07:29:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    betmo, last I read "P" was studying in Southern Cal and honing his views in the Libertarian sort of way (hurrah for me!!!)... I doubt the kid is going to be a Neo-con.
    Ellie, nice blog. Your comments in Betmo's blog made me come over for a look-see, kudos :)

     
  • At 5/29/2006 07:33:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    p.s.
    I think Bush 41's unpopularity was due to the recession and not for any blatant mis-steps during his admin. Think of it, the guy had a 91% approval rating 10 months before the election due to Gulf War I. If H.Ross Perot had not syphoned 19% of the votes in 1992 I doubt we would have had 8 years of Clinton.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 08:21:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    celticfire - me too.

    politiques USA - they definately did. I didn't hear that specific story but I have heard others. The man who made the voting machines in Ohio promised to deliver Ohio to Bush on a silver platter. What amazes me though, is how they managed to steal not only one, but TWO elections. and yes, direct voting would be much better and much more democratic.

    betmo - I really hope you're right.

    truth-pain - thanks for visiting and glad you like. I hope you're right about "P". It would be great if we never had to see another Bush in the White House. I think Bush Sr. lost some popularity by looking at his watch throughout the debate. Still, I think Clinton was probably one of the best things that happened to this country (Monica aside).

     
  • At 5/29/2006 10:07:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    Ha!.. I nearly forgot about the "watch" moment at the debate. You're correct on that,... that alone was worth 2 or 3 points to the independents who were on the fence.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 10:30:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    Before the latest elections I was surfing on some security websites and I fount out that the "diebold" machines had security flaws. They said they were going to take care of the issues and they never did anyway.

     
  • At 5/29/2006 10:57:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    truth-pain - the watch thing even annoyed me and I was clearly for Clinton. I think you're right on the independents. The people who were 100% behind Bush probably didn't even notice it.

    politiques USA - just like everything else, they say they're going to do it and they never end up actually getting to it. They spend all their time talking about what they're going to do and never actually accomplish anything. They should take particular care to make sure the voting runs smoothly to preserve our precious democratic elections, but of course that doesn't happen.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 01:04:00 AM, Blogger steven rix said…

    :)

    Who's going to be the next President then?
    OMG!

     
  • At 5/30/2006 01:05:00 AM, Blogger steven rix said…

    *yawn* i'm going to bed.
    I prefer not to think about the US democracy, it gives me an headache :)

     
  • At 5/30/2006 01:11:00 AM, Blogger Ellie said…

    you never know...in this country it could be anyone. Could even be you or me...

    Don't let the U.S. democracy get to you. Good night :)

     
  • At 5/30/2006 01:54:00 AM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    P-USA,... we should all remember that we are not a pure "Democracy" as espoused by the Greeks, but a Contitutional Republic,... a mutation of sorts between Democracy and Parliamentary status. We elect representation of Government not direct Goverment. Our founders in their "glorious fore-thought" did not think all peasants, farmers and hoi polloi et al were to be trusted with enough cognotive reasoning to elect a President in direct form so they created the Electoral College instead. Its not perfect, but It is the great experiment of world democracy that thrived where others failed to do so.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 10:11:00 AM, Blogger billie said…

    libertarian or neo-con- we don't need another bush in the white house. bush 1 was really just reagan part 2 anyway and when he lost- he told the american people on the way out that we would pay. i believe they were his words- can't find them. msm seems to have gone silent on that point. i can only assume that we are paying now with bush 2 and hopefully poppa bush's ire at losing has been assuaged. as for 'p'- hopefully he nor his father will run for anything more. florida is in the crapper because of jeb and his policies. it's time to move on from a bush dynasty and a republican one for that matter. we need a break and time to repair the damage done by this one.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 05:07:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    truth-pain - true, the American democratic system has succeeded while other systems have failed and yes there are flaws in the system. However, Bush shouldn't have been able to steal the election. Also, I'm afraid that our democracy isn't being protected by Bush et al, and our contry is on its way to becoming a dictatorship. The middle class will soon be eliminated due to unemployment and heavy taxing. I think our forefathers would be horrified if they saw what Bush has done to our contry.

    betmo - definately. We need a Democrat in the White House to set our country back on its feet. another Bush would cripple this country. and yes, we've paid for that and more.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 05:44:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    I agree in your summation. The ironic thing about it is that if Gore could have won his own state of Tenessee (and / or Clinton helped in Arkansas) Florida would have been a moot point.
    I admit that a lot of funky stuff happened in 2000, and the Supreme Court is no place for a decision like that to have been decided, but in my book, any candidate who can't carry his own state doesn't deserve to win regardless of the caliber (or lack thereoff) of the opposition. Gore was the poet of his own poetry.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 11:08:00 PM, Blogger Human said…

    Hi Ellie.
    Whoever it is, I tend to think we invest too much in "one" person to solve all the problems. Unless we have a fundemental re awaking of Democracy and Constitutional responsibilties, it won't matter who is President.

    The hit machines are after President Gore all ready.

    It should also be known that Tennesee is hardly a State that has been known to have fair elections. Both parties(the Dems of coursenot beeing progresssives) have had ballot shennanigans for, well ever.
    In 2000 the Repubs disinfranchised many Afro-Americans by various methods.This was not much talked about in the MSM(less so then the seldom mentioned purging of Fla. voters rolls 2000). The only reason I know is reading NAACP's CRISIS magazine.
    Peace.

     
  • At 5/30/2006 11:09:00 PM, Blogger Human said…

    "beeing"? looks so funny I'll leave it there. Got a buzz away now.
    Peace.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 12:55:00 AM, Blogger Ellie said…

    truth-pain - I don't know much about voting in Tennesee and it is pretty bad that Gore couldn't even carry his home state. However, many people still think that Gore won the election fair and square. without Tennesee. I thought it was pretty pathetic in 2004 how John Edwards didn't carry his home state or any of the southern states. When Kerry selected him to be his VP I was happy about it and he was very impressive in his debate against Cheney. However, he carried no votes and added nothing to the campaign. Now he wants to run in 2008. He didn't get the votes then and he won't get them now. I think '08 is going to be between Gore and Hillary.

    human - there were many things that happened in 2000 that I'm sure never got out. The things that have gotten out haven't reached very far. The media tries to stifle these things. as for who's president I think we definately need a change. Maybe we need more than one person to make a difference but another republican would just make things worse. Another Bush would make things ten times as worse. I think we need a democrat in office who cares about our country and not about getting the most money for himself and screw everyone else.

    p.s. haha. love that word.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 01:41:00 AM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    I was going to save this rant for a future posting of my own but you have uncoiled it from me,...

    Every time I try to give the Democratic party a chance to earn my vote, most people I talk to pull out the Clinton/Gore bit. I can't find the fascination with Hillary Clinton or Al Gore. Seriously,.. and Bill Clinton was the ONLY Democrat i've ever voted for (a protest vote in 96' against Dole...but all the same)
    Personally I would love if Gore would just clean Hillary's clock in the primaries and have her scurry to run for President of the senate or something. Just to see her arrogant butt wither in the vine. As painful as it is to watch Gore, at least he stands for something and will lob verbal bombs with the best of them. I admire the guy. He took the sickest punch to the solar plexus in the history of politics in 2000 and kept his chin up, did the private thing at Harvard and Apple, and kept his quasi-public image enough in the open to be a thorn to Bush at every possible moment. Good for him. I dislike Bush as much or more that he does. What has Madamme Hillary done?... Field-poll tests every answer she gives, sits on the fence on half a dozen third-rail issues and has not come out for or against anything in 6 months. She is the stepford candidate. Doesn't want to piss on any group, no matter the ideology. Talk about playing it safe. It is amazing the gumption of this woman. Its like she expects people to come up and kiss the Ring in the primaries and give her de facto red carpet to the oval orifice.
    I agree with you that it will PROBABLY be one of those two... but the Democratic party has so many talented Governors like Warner(Virginia), Locke (Washington), Corzine (New Jersey),... the list goes on and on... and it always comes down to these two invalids. If the party of the Donkey loses again in the 2008, it is not because independents like me won't give them a shot, it is because you guys can't pick a solid candidate to save yourselves.
    Gore? 8 years of Clinton prosperity... he blows it. Kerry? 4 years of Bush bumbling, speech-polio and Iraq,... HE blows it.
    Just as America is tired of the Bush legacy, ... you have to understand that half of America is brain tired of the Clinton name as well. But go ahead and give her the nod. You do so at your own peril, ... and mine to unfortunately.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 02:06:00 AM, Blogger Ellie said…

    I'm not necessarily for Hillary. (I like Bill not Hillary). I agree with you about her not taking a position and playing it safe. She plays by the polls and changes her positions to fit the audience she's speaking to. Also, she hasn't come out against the War in Iraq and I think that whoever becomes president in '08 should be against the war, which Gore is. I agree with you that Gore actually stands for something. Many people think that he already won in 2000 and he has many people behind him. His work with global warming is starting to hit home with people. There are many good democratic senators out there who would probably make good presidential candidates in 2008. Fiengold has impressed me very much. Also Kane impressed me with his democratic response to Bush's state of the union. However, as far as presidential candidates go, it seems to be the same old people over and over, so I think it'll come down to Hillary and Gore. If it does I hope Gore beats her out because I think he could actually win. We need a democratic president too much to risk Hillary losing.

    People may be getting tired of the Clinton name, but the only reason that I would remotely want Hillary in the White House is because that'd mean Bill would be back in the White House. Of course she probably wouldn't let him do anything so she has nothing going for her. I picture her being attacked in the same way Kerry was attacked for flip flopping. She'll probably never take a definate position and I don't think she'll be a strong candidate.

    The fact that she learned all of those facts about global warming and climate effect for that press conference or whatever it was shows that she's feeling threatened. Otherwise she would have just stuck to her position. Oh right, she doesn't have one.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 11:02:00 AM, Blogger Human said…

    Sen. Clinton has taken a stand on the American-Iraq War. With the Bush Regime.

    I'm an Independent too.
    I will work against Sen. Clinton if she is nominated. Sen. Clinton is part of the problem. There is not any fundemental difference between Sen. Clinton or Bush.I compromised last time and supported and campaigned for Sen. Kerry. I will not throw my vote or efforts away again.

    DLC approved=Human unapproved.
    Time to break the mold. There is more than the 2 choices presented to us.

    Peace.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 04:18:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    ...Now you've really done it Ellie,... a mega-posting soon-to-come inpired by this most-elegant of discourses :)...

     
  • At 5/31/2006 07:27:00 PM, Blogger The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said…

    Hillary is Not a Lock for 2008. By Arianna Huffington

    Arianna Huffington was on the Colbert Report, and she said that if the Democrats nominate Hillary it's because they have a death wish.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 08:41:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    human - true there are more choices than Gore and Hillary, but do they actually have a realistic chance of getting the nomination? In 2004 I thought Dean was pretty good, but it ended up being Kerry and Bush. Partly because the "I have a scream" speech but still showing the mold is hard to break. Clinton managed to break it, so I guess it is possible. Maybe one of the other choices would run for vice-president. Personally I'd love to see a Gore-Feingold ticket.

    truth-pain - looking forward to that post already. :)

    w-dervish - I think it would definately be a death wish if Democrats nominated Hillary. I don't think she can pull it off, and the Democrats need a candidate that can win. And not only win, but get enough of a majority that the election cannot be stolen.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 08:49:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    w-dervish, I clicked a few links from that article and found: Will Gore Challenge Hillary in 2008? By Eleanor Clift.

    From it, I found this which echoes our previous discussion perfectly. "Unlike front runner Hillary Clinton, there is no doubt about where Gore stands and what he believes in. He opposed the Iraq war, he was against the Patriot Act and he spoke out forcefully against President Bush’s torture policies and warrantless eavesdropping. Gore has become the darling of the left, yet global warming is not, or shouldn’t be, a partisan issue."

    Global warming probably shouldn't become a political issue, but since abortion, and gay marriage have been exploited so much by the right, I guess it's the left's chance to strike back with global warming. It's a shame American politics has come to this.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 10:44:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    P-USA,... we should all remember that we are not a pure "Democracy" as espoused by the Greeks, but a Contitutional Republic,... a mutation of sorts between Democracy and Parliamentary status. We elect representation of Government not direct Goverment. Our founders in their "glorious fore-thought" did not think all peasants, farmers and hoi polloi et al were to be trusted with enough cognotive reasoning to elect a President in direct form so they created the Electoral College instead. Its not perfect, but It is the great experiment of world democracy that thrived where others failed to do so.

    I know that. The US is not a democracy and so is France. France is often called the French Republic, same thing for the "Islamic Iranian Republic". It's a philosophical debate between 2 guys. One of them was Plato and the other one was Socrate.

    People on the Planet are only debating about ideas inside a very closed circle of enclined respectable endoctrinated "thinkers". That's pretty sad, because a Democracy should be both ways and not only one way around :)
    It's about secularism vs "the other word" whatever you call this word. It certainly does not look like Democracy, that's for sure.

    Well, I live the way I want to live, and now I call it "freedom" because it only belongs to myself and nobody else's :)

    Cheers!

     
  • At 5/31/2006 10:54:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    THUS
    It makes it easier on Americans to get sacrificed for a wrong reason that is called "Freedom" while you should read "hegemony" or "oil" or "wealthy people" that does not give a shite about others but them.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 10:56:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    Your President is exposed to lies and warcrimes.

     
  • At 5/31/2006 11:08:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    P-USA:
    Thanks for the pointed reply. Its good that we can have good discourse in spite of our view differences. It has been a pleasure to debate this topic :)

     
  • At 6/01/2006 12:02:00 AM, Blogger The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said…

    Ellie, I would support Gore if he decided to run, although everything I've read indicates that he does not wish to.

    I went to my local library last week with a long list (30+) of political books I want to read. They did not have a single one of them. I lived in a small town in WI, and they had a great library. I moved to TN 2 years ago, and must say the library here is terrible.

    I filled out an intra-library loan form for a few books, but they wouldn't guarentee they'd be able to actually get any of them.

    One of the books I asked for was Gore's new one, "An Inconvenient Truth". I think that if the documentary is released on DVD I'll buy it.

     
  • At 6/01/2006 01:25:00 AM, Blogger steven rix said…

    Thanks for the pointed reply. Its good that we can have good discourse in spite of our view differences. It has been a pleasure to debate this topic :)

    You are welcome anytime in all honesty:) As long as we have intellectual debates. In life people are separated between vertical and horizontal experiences (think about it) and this is why people are so different from each other but only controled by a government. The other way is not possible. A democracy should be both ways and at this time since Bush is not supported anymore by Americans, this guy is still in power. That should tell us right away how bad this american democracy is, and we can't overthrown this chimp in the US since he comforted his power between different agencies in the US and since he is bought by medias.


    PS: I want you to think about one thing. Did Bush say there was terrorist links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Ben LAden? He never did... only the medias did.


    You've been educated all your life into this system.

    "We who are so good!". Same thing for France of course, except France did not kick anyone as bas as the US did. This is why 911 happened. One right does not make it wrong of course, but there has been as many military interventions as old the US is. Snif snif.

    And what goes around, will always comes around.

     
  • At 6/01/2006 01:43:00 AM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    Ellie, the eagle has landed, see ya' in my blog :)

     
  • At 6/01/2006 04:18:00 PM, Blogger Glen said…

    I don't think Jeb would get elected President. He's got two major things going against him. First, he's a devout catholic which the wingnuts aren't too fond of, secondly his wife i believe is from Mexico. Lastly, after the first two Bush's, people would have to have rocks in their heads to ever vote for another Bush.

     
  • At 6/01/2006 07:41:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    Jeb is in-line to be in 4 or 5 corporate Board of Directors, and make a few million a year. This guy is the smart one of the family. He is leaving while he is "ahead" of sorts...

     
  • At 6/01/2006 10:21:00 PM, Blogger The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said…

    I want you to think about one thing. Did Bush say there was terrorist links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden? He never did... only the media did.

    Uh, yes he did.

    Bush Reasserts Hussein-Al Qaeda Link President Bush insisted today that "numerous contacts" between the ousted government of Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorist network showed that the former Iraqi leader was a threat to the United States, despite a report by the Sept. 11 commission that found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda.

    "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda [is] because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda", Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting at the White House. (By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank, The Washington Post. 6/17/2004)

    Bush backs Cheney on assertion linking Hussein, Al Qaeda President Bush yesterday defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion this week that Saddam Hussein had longstanding ties with Al Qaeda, even as critics charged that the White House had no new proof of a connection.

    ...he and other members of his administration have continued to say they believe there were ties between Hussein and Al Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called Hussein "a patron of terrorism" and said "he had long established ties with Al Qaeda". (By Michael Kranish and Bryan Bender, The Boston Globe. 6/16/2004)

    Of course it was bush himself who "revised history" with this lie that his administration never linked al Qaeda and Saddam. He does this constantly because he is a pathelogical liar. What I don't understand is why the public and the media tolerates his constant lying.

    Bush, on Fox News 3/20/2006

    First, just if I might correct a misperception, I don't think we ever said – at least I know I didn’t say that there was a direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein.

    In fact, Bush justified the war against Iraq by directly linking it to 9/11

    The use of armed forces against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations or person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. (From Bush's Letter to Congress, 3/21/03)

     
  • At 6/02/2006 09:56:00 AM, Blogger billie said…

    holy crap- i'm gone one day and you all have a discussion without me! :) i want to weigh in with a couple of points: 1) there will not be a clinton or a gore in 2008. i am hoping that neither would be that stupid or politically unsavvy to do run. edwards is a nice man- but stupid if he runs. 2) we need to have at least one branch of the three in the opposing party's hands- and since bushco packed the judicial- it has to be either the legislative or executive branch. i would take both in the dems hands- but i would be content with one- preferably the legislative. that would give congress the time it needs to grow a new set of balls.

     
  • At 6/02/2006 03:11:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    politiques USA -
    we can't overthrown this chimp in the US since he comforted his power between different agencies in the US and since he is bought by medias.

    I agree with you on this, it'd probably be one of the best things that ever happened to this country. What he has done in his five years in office will take the US decades to turn around. It would be wonderful if we could throw the entire Bush administration out and get a democrat now, rather than having to hope a democrat can win in '08. Of course this won't happen. I doubt Bush will be impeached either, because as you said, he has too much power with the big corporations and the media.

    w-dervish - I've been meaning to read Gore's book, unfortunately I haven't had the time. I live in NYC and I can't imagine going to the library and them not having any of the books I want. In the city there are so many libraries around. It's a pain to go to five libraries looking for a book, but now they have them online so you can find the location of the book really easily.

    He does this constantly because he is a pathelogical liar. What I don't understand is why the public and the media tolerates his constant lying.

    leading me to wonder why he can't be impeached...

    truth-pain - I hope you're right about Jeb. I was busy all day yesterday but I'll head over to you're blog right after I'm finished with this comment.

    Glen - thanks for visiting. :) I hope you're right about Jeb. yes, his wife is Mexican and I think this is something against Jeb and "P". However, you never know. I never thought Bush would be reelected, but he was. As for being Catholic, I really don't see why they have a problem with that. The church backs up the issues that probably won Bush the '04 election: gay marriage, abortion, etc. and the Catholic priests were the ones denying communion to Kerry because of his politics. In spite of this, you're right it will work against him. and I hope it prevents him from being nominated because this country can't take another Bush.

    betmo - there will not be a clinton or a gore in 2008. i am hoping that neither would be that stupid or politically unsavvy to do run. edwards is a nice man- but stupid if he runs.

    I agree with you on edwards. He definately shouldn't run. Just out of curiosity, why do you feel this way about gore and clinton, and who do you think will run?

     
  • At 6/02/2006 06:34:00 PM, Blogger Dardin Soto said…

    Gracias por el honor de responder en mi humilde blog en el dia de hoy. My siento muy orgulloso de tener vuestra opinion en medio de mis otros visitantes,...
    (Summary tranlation of my quasi-Castillian Spanish)
    Thanks for droppin' in today,... a pleasure to read your opinions :)

     
  • At 6/02/2006 06:56:00 PM, Blogger billie said…

    ellie- a couple of reasons:
    1)we need clinton in the senate at this point- and quite frankly, i like her as a human being but this country is not ready for another clinton or a woman. 2) gore needs to fight for our environment and alternative fuel sources and he would be much more effective in the private capacity. i love al gore.

    who do i think should run? i am not looking that far ahead at this point because i am looking to the midterms this november. if murtha wasn't so old- i'd say him. man of integrity who could extract us from the military mess we're in.

    i think that we need to focus on people who will have the capacity to clean up the mess and appoint people to the various agencies who will have the know-how to clean up the mess bushco is leaving. bush said that he is leaving the iraq thing and the deficit to the next pres. hot potato- you're it.

     
  • At 6/02/2006 07:54:00 PM, Blogger 5th Estate said…

    Hi ellie...

    42 Comments thus far! , that's some busy-ness!
    "Guilt by association" is a dubious argument, as is "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". Just because Jeb's last name is Bush doesn't mean he couldn't be a "black sheep" and thus contrarian.
    That's me trying to be rational.

    That said one only need look at his record and the fact that the newly crowned Worst President Ever" (according to the latest Quinnipiac poll--and in the obverse scoring 3% as Best Pres. ever) recommends him is grounds for everyone to be concerned. It's not just the Bush family , it's who the republicans rely on and how they play the game to get into power. Having gained both Houses and the execcutive and with disastrous foreign and domestic policies polls suggest they have blown their chance and their image. Being so image driven, Jeb would be a "good" candidate--qualified by being relatively untainted, yet another front-man for private interests.

    As for Guiliani being a candidate (re: truthpain's blog) he's making too much money being famous and consulting on urban security issues--he doesn't need the aggravation of the Presidency.

     
  • At 6/02/2006 10:59:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    I agree with you on this, it'd probably be one of the best things that ever happened to this country. What he has done in his five years in office will take the US decades to turn around.

    It will take ages. I personally think that lots of US Presidents and some of their advisers since WW2 are war criminals. No war has ever been pure whatever we call it, "Freedom" (Bush), Justice (Napoleon), or "Social-Nationalism" (Hitler) or "Marxism" (Soviet-Union) because they are all imperialist in the first place and suggest there is a place between Good and Evil while these ideologies have been very evil in themselves.



    Here is a text translated from French into English to understand what is going on in their heads:

    An anthropology analyzing the politics and the history of our species by scrutinizing its theological brain will observe that an imperial democracy moves in a new Andersen's tale where the naked king of the great Danish presents himself armed to the teeth. An anthropological psychoanalysis, therefore existential, of its power leads to the discovery of an unconscious of grace trapped in advance by falling in torture.

    To sharpen the eyes of political Europe, one must specify how a simiohuman history strives to delineate the frontier between reality and myth, politics and utopia.

    1 - The torpidity of the political spirit of Europe
    2 - A Europe of an Andersen's tale
    3 - Comparative psychophysiology of the Soviet ex-empire and the American empire
    4 - Two edenisms
    5 - Comparative analysis of concentration systems
    6 - The Christian concentration camp
    7 - A psychoanalysis of an American torture
    8 - A recall of history
    9 - Return to the anthropological psychoanalysis of the Sacred
    10 - America and the theology of anguish

    1 - The torpidity of the political spirit of Europe

    Three major experiences marked the XXth century: Mussolinian Fascism, Hitlerian Nazism and Soviet Marxism. All three prefigured the seraphic forms which American imperialism would take with its cornucopia of the idealities, with a Messianic conditioning of opinion in the name of the myth of redemptive freedom, with the simplification of a field of vision conceptualized by an horizon of promising abstractions, with the promotion of a " Good " and an " Evil " mythified on the model of Manichean orthodoxies of salvation and damnation. But these immemorial molds of the sacred in black and white found their most simplistic and massive theological turn in the mythical edenism from which American imperialism has made its religious ornament.

    When the psychobiological understanding of the strange appearance of the three monotheisms takes its first steps in anthropology, European's political reason remains trivialized by millenary administrative practices of the States. How the art of governing would'nt rebel against the constitution of an anthropology of the American imperialism which would illuminate the relationships between the American unconscious religiousness and the hyper-industrialization of modern democracies, and which would bring forth the theological foundations of the empire's polical unconscious ?

    A rereading of the history of civilizations mind, a reflection nurtured by a profound knowledge of the evolution of our skull, a psychoanalysis of the bio-dreamlike life of a species whose mental unconscious is the prey of worlds divided between their paradise and their hell, all of these are necessary tasks.

    The historians of the XXIst century will mention that in 2004, a great part of the European ruling class was so late in the radiographic knowledge of our species' two-phase brain that it was extremely constrained from understanding how the United States had become a schizoid empire, thus messianically expanding through the five continents, and that the irrepressible ambitions of this nation dichotomized by its "salvation" theology had to be observed in the light of the laws which govern the growth and which command the failure of the empires self-mythified by their religious seraphism. But moreover, it was urgent to become aware of the fate that governs the modern wars for the control of the new energy resources, in these times, the oil supply had become the key of the domination of the world. To capture the black gold reserves, the empire needed a strategy of abduction, which was in great contrast to the myth of the American empire's religious predestination. The planet's brain had become the hostage of the theopolitic of these soteriological democracy's annunciations.

    In truth, Nazism and Marxism had already resolutely presented redemptive and bloody forms of politics. But the first ideologies connecting to a dreamlike future of politics, therefore to a dream of salvation on the five continents, had only delayed the armed landing of the evangelist American dream, which had remained artificially under pressure and whose victory of 1945 was going to release an eschatological surge. Why did the European elites of the beginning of the third millennium still entirely ignored the religious nature of the "liberators" empires and their vocation to seize the world? They did not have at their disposal the keys to a critical anthropology which would have enabled them to decipher the biblical bases of political America. This was due to the fact that the leading classes of the time had an insufficient knowledge of history. For a long time the most informed men of CLIO had tried to arm their memory with the elementary reference marks provided by chronology.

    One remains disconcerted reading, in 1986, under Jean Favier's pen, member of the Institute and general director of the Archives of France, an explanatory text illustrating the lack of information of the "cultivated general public " to whom was addressed the remarkable "Chronicles of Humanity" published by Larousse:

    "The American victory in the war against Spain in 1898 transformed the United States, a regional power, into a world wide imperialist power which appropriated a vast insular area in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The old Spanish possessions - Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines - were placed under American protectorate. Central America, the "back-yard of the USA" and the Far East became the usual theatres of the American imperialist policies. A maritime power on the Atlantic and the Pacific, the USA could secure their possessions with only two distinct fleets. A colossal policy intended to procure maritime equipment, started by President Theodore Roosevelt, made it possible for the United States to become in 1907 the second naval power of the world, behind the United Kingdom, although they occupied the fifth rank three years earlier. In the center of the strategic conditions of the American imperialism, we find the Panama Canal, a link between the two oceans and the only means to efficiently guarantee the colonial empire. President Roosevelt proclaimed the United States right to intervene directly in the interior affairs of the Central American countries to guarantee their safety, when the American political or economic interests required it." (p.937)

    This overview of the situation courageously appeared "committed" at the time. How was it possible that educated France had not learned these facts during primary school?

    2 - A Europe of an Andersen's tale

    More than one century has passed since the war of 1898. For almost sixty years, the American had sovereign garrisons on European ground - garrisons therefore set up in enclaves of a foreign state's territory on our European ground. It is a reign that allows us just now to understand that since 1945 the planet's history is that of the expansion of an American empire. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not stop its impetus and September 11, 2001, only accelerated its pace. This phenomenon can only be compared to the immense delay that the Hellenic world and its pedagogues showed to the discovery of the rise of Rome and to explain it to their schoolboys. But who could imagine that such a blindness, considered to be extraordinary by the historians of the ancient world, would happen again millenniums later, and this only because no one was teaching the rising generation that politics is the language of history? How is it that the American presence all around the Mediterranean sea seemed taken for granted and accepted, and that Europe was only asking for a modest share of this imperium?

    When the United States announced that they were going to build in Bagdad their largest embassy and that it would employ three thousand people; when everyone was seeing the American empire building military bases in Iraq intended to accommodate a hundred and twenty thousand men in residence; when Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defense, expected that there would

    " not be any change in our military deployment between June 30 and July 1st, unless we remain there on the invitation of an Iraqi sovereign government, which will ask us to stay until the killers, as those who did the atrocities of Falloujah, are put out of state of harm" ( Le Monde diplomatique, May 2004),

    how come the whole world was transported in a reversed tale of Andersen (*) , in which the king wasn't naked in the middle of his "brightly-colored chamberlains", but armed to the teeth? How come the aureola of democracies which was floating over the king's head emitted such powerful rays that the king's heart was metamorphosed as a humans right's church in front of the whole universe?

    Such an apostolic mystery could only be explained by an anthropology of holiness as strong as Andersen's spectrography, if this was possible. In these distant times, Noam Chomsky evoked "the empire's autism ". But the descent into the depths of an autism crowned by divine grace required not only a quest in the kingdom of the mystical unconscious of our species, but a psychoanalysis of theology that exceeded the means of investigation that were those of the psychobiological genius of the great Danish writer.

    To try to understand Andersen's tale, one must shed a comparative light on Marxist and American edenism. This will make it possible to go down in the first anthropological mysteries of modern empires and to exert us to make a little progress in the speleology of the dreamlike life of simiohuman history. Thus a genealogy of the politico-religious unconscious of the monotheisms will make us witness the conclusion of an alliance between sacred orthodoxies and democratic totalitarianism.

    3 - Comparative psychophysiology of the Soviet ex-empire and the American empire

    One remembers how the expansion of the Soviet empire rested on the rise of the world wide proletariat to the rank of redeemer of mankind. Modern messianism was singing an hymn to the planetary victory of justice over the injustice of capitalism. The promise of salvation on earth had benefited from the guarantee of a foreteller and of an infallible intercessor of a working class deliverance on an international scale. The new vehicle for the Scriptures of Freedom was called the " historical process ". This means of transporting of the happy and the blessed towards a tangible paradise was introducing a new type of split in the simiohuman brain, between the religious dream and reality.

    The panoply of the cerebral dichotomies already indexed in the nomenclatures of schizoid theologies of the time was from now on being armed with a dialectic and a genealogy of "concrete truth " on the whole inhabited earth. When the armies of the " Warsaw Pact " were seizing a nation - Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary - they were installing in these countries governments won over to a new Vatican, and supposedly expressing the will of the sovereign people. This is why these countries were called people's democracies, in opposition to middle-class democracies. Marxism had carried the 1789 liberation principles to their soteriological achievement in Russia, where they had found their Holy See. The Western States legitimated these wars known as " liberating wars". They were considered based on a ground mystic of bliss which Christianity had relegated to the beyond only after a century of setbacks on earth. Nobody was fooled by the disguises in international law of a tyranny validated by a semi-religious finalism.

    Facing this eschatology to conformity with the sacrilizing mentalities of orthodoxe Russia, the American empire had been able to consolidate its democratic soteriology, to extend and to win a despotism which had capitalist Europe shaking . But following the collapse of Marxist edenism, the United States naturally took care not to withdraw their troops from the Old Continent - on the contrary, they reinforced the guardianship which they had been exerting since 1945 by the means of NATO and they perennialized in times of peace the mission that this military organization had achieved during the cold war. Controlled Europe was agreeing to it.

    Under these conditions, it is crucial to reach an anthropological analysis, therefore biopsychic, of the parareligious weapons which will make it possible for the American empire to relay the Marxist dream. The theologies of the two empires were meeting in a common paradisiacal dream, a dream rooted in the origins of Judaism and Christianity because messianisms are all grounded in the myth of an escape out of the prison world described as " temporal ", the prison world of "ritual Egypt " which the Exodus episode had concretized the original symbolic system under Moïse's commandment. The examination of the differences in method and of the parallelisms that we can notice in the two empires of Eden will make it possible to specify the schizoid structure of the dreamlike brain that these two messianisms are sharing.

    4 - Two edenisms

    The evangelism and angelism belonging to the democratic type of the universal dream of an Eden suffer from two handicaps whose impact was discovered by Marxism only with great delay. The first handicap results from the fact that "human rights " and "freedom " are by definition ideal, therefore abstract by nature, which generates a sacred veneration capable of protecting them from an examination of the degree of application to the real history of their seraphic universality. For this reason, they appear of a more theological usage, therefore more dreamlike, than Marxist edenism, which was dreaming of putting a very large proletariat in immediate and direct possession of its rights and its powers on earth. But these salvation prerogatives remained attached to the needs and the wishes of labor status, therefore related to an ignorance and an inculturation which predisposed the proletariat to an incapacity of efficiently exert by itself the responsibilities of a leading class. Also the proletarian elites went through the party's school charged with teaching them the catechesis of a new ecclesiocracy.

    This pedagogy was so well copied on those of the seminaries, that the collective high office and prestige the labor class claimed for itself were fatally leading them, like all churches, to the devaluation of individual capacities for the advantages of a powerful collective ego. Such a cerebral dichotomy necessarily led to the destruction of talent and genius, therefore ruining the grounds of civilization. On the other hand, this final catastrophe was outlined against a half century term. Meanwhile, Marxist edenism could have at will the support of the crusaders of masses' salvation, crusaders whose compact and blind regiments were receiving the parareligious support of legions of apostolic intellectuals coming from the middle-class. The American empire, on the other hand, was based on a more verbal edenism, therefore looked more vaporous, but grounded on a resolute individualism, therefore on the intense valorization of particular merits. A messianism based on quality constitutes a political handicap and advantages. The war on Iraq was going to show the difficult divide of this situation.

    The Marxists masses did not have the eyes to observe the Soviet empire in action. Neither did they see the Kremlin putting its hands on the resources of the nations it occupied, just as the faithful ones of the XVIth century could not see the Church piling up a treasure of war through the sale, at its own desks, of entry bonds to paradise. On the other hand, the American empire's edenism was offering cynically and for everyone to see the spectacle of its industrial and commercial ambitions. By rehabilitating the spirit of lucre in the posterity of Calvinism, the good capitalist conscience insulted the worship of poverty linked not only to the Christianity of the origins, but also to Buddhism. Moreover, the source of asceticism is the Stoicians' philosophy.

    While the proletarian dream was nurtured by ignorance and the simplicity of spirit of the candidates to a future Eden, American edenism could only be openly propagated by the joint force of weapons and industry. The military victory was accumulating ruins and piling up dead bodies for the sole purpose of filling the order books of the big American companies. As to the nations called to grow rich at the sides of the warriors of business and enticed by the to profit from the gigantic and profitable market of rebuilding at high price the losers' pulverized dwellings, their avid complicity was also associating them to the hard verdict of what the religious edenisms are necessarily tributary here below: success on the ground. The cerebral dichotomies whose apparatus of the Sacred is that of political Utopia, are subjected to the expected verdicts of the court of victory and of defeat of weapons.

    Marxist edenism had called upon a crusade of the poor and had encountered a universalization of stupidity. The American edenism was holding up the standard of lucre clothed in political euphoria. But the anthropological difference between the empires of dreams and of salvation is even more instructive if one compares the systems of repression which they generated.

    5 - Comparative analysis of concentration systems

    The Stalinian gulags were supposed to purify the world of the plague of capitalist profit. They were working on the glossy model of the conversion and the redemption of the sinner. The labor camps were at the same time punitive and cleansing. The new catechism was managed with roughness. It was leading the sinner to a paradise at once far away and about to land at any moment. When the fanaticism of proletarian salvation had seized the Marxist myth, it had accumulated the piles of the corpses of Pol Pot. Facing such titanic setbacks, democratic holiness believed to have won its case, all the more than the recalcitrance of Karl Marx's victims to conquer the supposed freedom, equality and fraternity at the price of the extinction of capitalist profit appeared inveterate. How is it that under such seemingly favorable conditions, the invasion of American democratic edenism caused a more immediate and more violent revulsion than the one that brought down the tyranny of a Soviet leading class as unfaithful to its own orthodoxy as the Roman clergy toward the Gospels?

    Initially, the prophets of the New World could not believe their eyes concerning how the stubborn impiety of the Iraqi people made Iraqis take arms against the New World's holy idealities. And yet, the new religion of redemption and of salvation was self confident, devilishly jaunty, full of sufficiency and boasting. Wasn't its natural lightness the legitimated product of its innate innocence? But it was too much convinced of the inferiority of the peoples remaining on earth and located at so great a distance from the paradise of the new chosen ones. The mocking and laughing pace of that new religion's promises were not forgiven.

    But then, one could barely understand the sacredness which allowed women amused to be photographed at the sides of the defeated left naked like worms and attached by the neck to a leash for dogs. These tamers- angels, specialized in the exercise of the virtues of democracy, were illustrating another weakness of American edenism. I already emphasized that, from its point of view, the expansion of the marxian empire had progressed as a creeping model, and without resorting to massive and prolonged carnages, because it had been secured by armies of workerselated by a mystic of deliverance. The capitalist yoke had been broken, it was said, by the inaugural Revolution of 1917, then by the bloody weapons of Utopia and the heresy proceedings.

    On the other hand, Washington's edenism was dressing up wild beasts in a circus of Goodness. By holding up the banners of democratic idealities on a worldwide scale, the White House was inaugurating the seraphic era of despotism. As a result, the American military conquests needed to get a planetary holly clothing, which could only be if other angelic nations were also coming to occupy, by the use of weapons, the conquered territories for the benefit of the empire of Goodness. The spectacle of this gigantic conversion of force into virtue had gone as far as being a caricature. We saw microscopic States sending about fifty soldiers, because it was important to conquer in a hurry the symbol of justice and right which their physical presence were supposed to embody. The universality of the ethics engraved on the blazon of apostolic democracies was turning over against its apostles. The Chrism (Saint chrème) with which one had coated bombs and guns was flaking off. Marxism, on the other hand, was feeling sufficiently legitimated by the Gospels of saint Marx not to have to call the armies of capitalist sin and stain in reinforcement of freedom and of the sovereignty of the people.

    Also the revelation through the broadcast, on the five continents, of the maltreatment and tortures by the American army at Guantanamo, then in Iraq, had ruined in only one definitive blow the theology of the American Eden, while the Marxist Eden had been able to flourish before the advent of a civilization left to the ubiquity of its own theatre. The empire's evangelism was telling, from now on, the adventures of a universal conscience in the way of a comic strip with multiple episodes.

    Initially, Washington had tried to keep the sinners in an unhappy, but accidental adventure: it was only a question of "brebis galeuses" - the English language calls them "black sheep" -, as the White House was saying , whose exemplary and fast punishment was going to be enough to purify Eden, at a moment stained by an extraordinary contest of circumstances. But soon a tightly written report of more than fifty pages of a General engaged on the ground had confirmed that there was indeed an institutionalization of torture systematically and expressly authorized by the highest authorities of the army and by the American State.

    How come the myth of freedom on which the New World's democracy was resting since Abraham Lincoln, had produced a concentration camp system that some had succeeded in hiding for a few months, but that appeared to everyone as natural as the Russian gulags?

    For scientific anthropology, the essential effect of this discovery results in the spectacularly confirmation of the sacred origins of torture so that it became impossible not to connect it to the Manicheist origin of all monotheistic religions, something that I have emphasized since September 11, 2001 on my web site. How do we study thoroughly our analyses of the cerebral dichotomy of which mankind suffers at the present stage of its evolution ?

    6 - The Christian concentration camp

    The first theological model of Gulags, of Nazi concentration camps, and of the torture rooms imagined by the democratic empire isn't anything else than the hell of Christians and Moslems, those eternal atrocities are so thoroughly described by Dante that they appear among the pearls of the Sacred to be ranked among the treasures of world literature. Facing such anthropological obviousness, how long will the traditional social sciences be able to take advantage of the status of a science based on a voluntary blindness which was believed to be exclusively reserved for theological thought? Isn't it time to analyze how a specifically "scientific " blindness can respond to an "angelism" common to " experimental knowledge ", to politics and to the Sacred?

    How can we call rational a knowledge of the escaped prisoners from an animal world that would remain timorously silent over the pathetic articulation between dreamlike worlds and real worlds, an articulation which our brain seems stamped from birth? The time has come to give a look at the holy synergies between dreamed cruelties of the Sacred and the cruelties put into practice by political schemers, or we will have to give up any anthropology whose rationality would be to the scale of this spectacle. One calls "scientific" an objectivity able to illuminate the subjectivity of illusory problematics that blindness manages to be adorned.

    Than, it appears that if the "angelism" of human consciousness is the ground of all theologies which claim to be rooted in the divine election of the "justs", and if the Nazi, Marxist and American concentration camps share a theology of torture precisely founded on the proclamation of the innocence of the torturers, then this model of devotion refers point by point to the staging of Christian paradise and hell. Therefore the chosen ones on earth are proclaimed the champions of piety and justice. Their seraphism is so innate in this world that they don't spare a glance for the damned that they watch being cooked slowly in their underground oven. As the sovereign of the universe of these savages is none other than the savage creator of the world, who raised the devil to the rank of guardian and general administrator of his gigantic Gulag, scientific anthropology leads to the psychobiological spectrography of the three single gods. As a result, the scientific study of simiohuman theology enters the field of historical and political documentation on cerebral and moral evolution of mankind; and the history of the psychophysiology of idols becomes the key to a real scientific anthropological knowledge of humans.

    As long as a religion is believed true, and therefore is sincerely practiced by tens of million of faithfuls, hell plays a central part in politics because the strategy of punishment is the heart of politics , thus the leading classes and heaven join together to discipline mankind. The brutality of tortures is thus the barometer of the gravity of the danger to be fought: the infinite cruelty of "God " is declared proportional to the need its " holy justice" has to fight the plague of sin. The Messianic wars of democracies considered to express the will and the concerns of their celestial rearms of values, the comparative observation of the modes of torture of Nazism, Marxism and the American empire appears to be the privileged instrument of the anthropological weighing of the simiohuman political brain.

    Naturally, when the political weakening of religions makes them seraphic, their irresponsibility turns them unsuitable for the anthropological weighing of the species. This is why the Christian theology of tortures is heuristic only from the first century to the twentieth; but the Roman theology of hell has not changed an iota, therein the documentation of anthropological science cannot be supported by the apparent irenicism of catechism since Vatican II.

    7 - A psychoanalysis of American torture

    A science of mankind based on critical observation of the brain of the civilizations of liberation and salvation requires a comparative psychoanalysis of the three monotheist theologies and of their history, as well as the examination of their ideological copies. So the schizoid brain of Marxian type rested on the execration of the empire of evil that was in its view embodied by the capitalism of the XIXth and XXth centuries. The religious brain of the American type gives birth to a collateral theological empire rooted in immemorial time : Evil and Good refer to the myth of the innocence of the First Couple. We find GW Bush declaring that nothing appeared more enigmatic to him than the hostility of the external world towards the United States; and he claimed to the face of the world: " We who are so good!"

    American torture appears so well connected to the biblical innocence of the inhabitants of Eden, that it presents itself under the features of the most common piety. An anthropology, sacrilegious by definition, because it is scientific, must explain the genealogy of the divided life of the brain of humanity since this strange species escaped from the animal world. I can only propose some political and historical leads for a research on the universality of the simiohuman's unconscious which controls this existential bipolarity.

    Everyone knows that in the West the torturer was condemned to hide with all his family as if he were plague-stricken, because of the theological shakiness of the divino-human justice, which condemned murder, but legitimated the death penalty and the infernal tortures. As for America, it tries to escape from the dichotomy of its religious unconscious by making cherubic its policy of the purification of the universe. One will notice, in this spirit, that American soldiers guilty of tortures in Iraq are seraphic and that they kindly accept being photographed at the sides of their victims, undoubtedly in order to enrich their album of patriotic memories. Democratic senator Mr. Patrick Leahy, former president of the commission of judiciary affairs, sees in this the proof that they are protected by the authority line. But this authority covers them because of the religious unconscious that controls American politics. Without an anthropological knowledge of this unconscious, historical science is blind, so much so that the particularity of the smiling Eden is precisely to metamorphose the humiliations inflicted to the prisoners as expressions of faith of the empire of Goodness, which calls for the need to promote bliss on earth. The purification of the world by torture belongs to a form of piety. .

    8 - A recall of history

    To understand it, it is necessary for us to return for a moment to the imperial explosion of 1898 evoked above by Jean Favier. At that time, the Secretary of State Elihu Root wrote that the American soldier is

    " different from other soldiers of all the other States of the world since the world started. He is the vanguard of freedom and justice, of law and order, peace and happiness. "

    The perfect achievement of the will of God on earth had made it possible for America to spread its kindness and its blessings in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, in Mexico and among the indigenous populations of the Pacific. The " national nobility of soul" had left the limbo to land in real history. American democratic messianism is a reproduction or a stand-in of the myth of incarnation - it comes down from the heavens of divine justice.

    The nation - expressly designated by the divinity to achieve its projects in this world - conforms itself to the prophesied mission since the XVIIth century by Calvinists, who were already seeing America as the " redeemer of nations ". For this reason, it is predestined to build a " city of paradise " that all nations will have to imitate. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson added:

    "I believe that God placed in us a prophetic vision of freedom (...) I nurture the hope that we were selected, in an outstanding way, in order to show to the other people of the world how they must march towards freedom."

    The defeat of Nazis and the fall of Communism were going to confirm the national conviction which expresses Francis Fukuyama's vision in The End of History (La fin de l'histoire): after eight thousand years of social development, humanity discovered that democratic and liberal capitalism finally carried out the final synthesis that universal History was waiting for impatiently, between " moral goals and fundamental national interests " of America. Also Duncan Hunter, member of the Chamber of the representatives can write:

    " America is the strength of good. Our troops changed the world and built a future for the Iraqi people. "

    As for Tom Delay, the leader of the majority in the House, he does not fear to add:

    " The operation Iraqi Freedom , whatever the rift it showed, is an absolute good. "

    9 - Return to the anthropological psychoanalysis of the Sacred

    What is the degree of the religious guilt of the tortured ones that will come about from this mental world? Paradoxically, the damned will be given a floating theological status, because the redemptive good conscience from which the torturers profited, and which makes the torturers safe from a contamination by evil, which abounds in the outside world, [this redemptive conscience] reduces the weight of the damnation pronounced by the angels' justice, a damnation that weighs heavily on the shoulders of the heretics, but without crushing them completely. It is known that Calvin is a theological son of Saint Augustin and that the bishop of Hippone is the first theorist of the fatality of sin of which are burdened for all eternity the wretched that the unfathomable mystery of the creator's arbitrariness did not predestine to salvation.

    But the author of the Confessions is also the theologian of grace: the infinite freedom and power of the creator can save in extremis the worst of infidels. This is why American torture is held in suspension somewhere between eternal flames and Eden thus, so to speak, in the " midair of the atmosphere ", according to Descartes: we will not gouge out the eyes of the prisoners, we will not pull out their nails, but we will starve, dehydrate, sodomize them, we will let them be gibed, exposed naked to the threat of aggressive dogs, because the principal torture, from the point of view of a theology of predestination to salvation or to damnation, is the torture of a moral humiliation in front of God.

    The tortured ones are guilty in advance because the creator collectively judged them to be from their birth strangers to the blessings the kingdom of Good could bring to them and they are condemned to refuse its benefits. The consequence of this theology of "self-innocenting" is that Americans are sincerely astounded to find themselves rejected and hated by the rest of the world. Quite simply, they cannot get over the fact that they find themselves the victims of a such great injustice, while " being so good ", they who bring to a lower civilization the religious treasures of democracy and its Gospel of Freedom. Not for one moment do these idolaters of their heaven doubt of the legitimacy of the war that led them straight in these oil-bearing places, since God is their guide and that He took them by the hand to have them discover the country of Canaan. It is thus without batting an eyelid that the flabbergasted by the absolute condemn those that resist their occupation and that they qualified them as " terrorists " and "killers" obstinately rebellious to the deliverance which the heaven of democracy brings to them totally free of charge.

    We also saw all the American political community, John Kerry ahead in the lead, declaring itself "outraged" by the decapitation of an American industrialist as retaliation to tortures of tens of thousands of Iraqis in the American prisons . The empire's good conscience was so well reinforced that the future White House candidate could state:

    " Now, there is no doubt that we must continue ".

    However, this last adventure is understandable only in the light of a radiography of the theological unconscious of the nation: absolute evil, that of the Scriptures, which obeyed to the law of retaliation, is opposed to the "self-innocenting" of the elected officials. The Calvinistic edulcorating of the principle "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" is seen as the world advent of holiness on earth; but an angelized repression leads to the proliferation of refined forms of cruelty - and initially to interminable methods of torture, therefore adapted in advance to the incurable character of the sin to counteract!

    The unanimity and the immediate reaction of the American political community in front of a murder committed according to the "old law " school shows very well the psychological knot of imperial theology: the main thing is to legitimate before God the war of conquest and the occupation. Naturally, Kerry isn't duped : he knows that the theological mask is used to sanctify the final Americanization of the Mediterranean region. But the need to reinforce the religious cover of the Empire's expansion around the Mare Nostrum is nonetheless a revolution ; moreover, what will political Europe become if it condemns the empire for ethical reasons without grasping the essential, which is not theological: it is a question of being opposed to the territorial expansion of an empire, and it is for this purpose that an anthropology able to decipher the unconscious of different theologies is an essential intellectual weapon.

    10 - America and the theology of anguish

    We can see that an existential psychoanalysis of theologies is a key to history and to politics. But at the same time, American messianism is eaten up from the inside by the cruel obviousness that the ruin of Marxist heresy and of its deadly immorality neither sanctified the globalization of trade, nor legitimated the gigantic profits of the great international companies. How will the thickest armor of political innocence be endorsed ? How will one remain happy and hopping in the universe of a blinded Eden of "Goodness"? How will one attend the spectacle of a civilization horrified by the hell of capitalist profits whose brutality replaced the Stalinian hell? The theological drama of America, inaugurated with the rout of Vietnam, lands in the third millennium.

    Then the other face of Calvin's theology arises, expressing doubt and anguish: the believer is never sure to be the chosen one. What definitive proof would he have? Nothing other than the abundance of material goods the divinity wishes to grant him. This is why, in the beginning, the Genevan Calvinists were both ascetics and rich bankers. The American defeat in Iraq will be a terrifying theological trauma, because it will be the public proof of the disowning of the nation of the chosen ones by the divinity. Naturally, all this will be happening in the non-explored depths, therefore carcinogenic, of the religious unconscious of the nation. But how does one explain that Saint Augustin's God made thirty two nations accomplices of a torturer? We wish a lot of pleasure to the future theologians of the American God. Modern anthropology only raises the true question, the only question with a scientific status : why do the escaped ones from zoology [i.e. from the hominid branch of evolution] use their 1,5% advance on the psychogenetic capital of Chimpanzees to elevate themselves in so many different ways in the holy sky.

    Does a humanity torn between its animal impulses and the failures of its leaps up to pseudo angelical worlds testify to an incurable savagery? To find it out, isn't the rational knowledge the new pedagogue of hope? An anthropology based on the psychophysiological observation of theologies and attentive to the diversity of their schizoid representations of the world, appeals just as easily to the spectrography of religious beliefs of different times and places, as to the weighing of the bipolar mental structure which commands them all.

    (*) : All the European children know the famous Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen ( 1805-1875 ), whose most famous tale told the story of a king that extraordinary dressmakers - and doubtless philosophers - claim to dress with the most luxurious ornaments and never ever seen in any kingdom of the earth. But these clothes are invisible, because they are quite imaginary. The prestige of the makers is so eminent and they are so overcome with admiration in front of the beauty of their work that nobody, at the court dares to acknowledge that they can't see the brightness, the wealth and all this splendor. Then the day arrives that the monarch presents to his people the magnificence of his new royal clothing. All courtiers faint with admiration in front of these wonders, except for a child who shouts: " The king is naked". Morality: the truth comes out of the mouth of the children; morality: the illusion leads the world; morality, GW Bush is a democratic king. His ornaments are idealities with angels' wings which make the nations hover in the sky of justice and freedom. But this time the child shouts: " But he is armed up to his teeth! Such armored cars, such artillery, such prisons are the armor of this king ! "

     
  • At 6/03/2006 02:25:00 PM, Blogger The Prophet Dervish Z Sanders said…

    Just because Jeb's last name is Bush doesn't mean he couldn't be a "black sheep" and thus contrarian. That's me trying to be rational.

    Jeb Bush is a normal member of the bush clan. By that I mean he's corrupt just like the rest of them. I think there wouldn't be much difference between a "W" and a "Jeb" presidencey. Perhaps he'd be even worse!

    BuzzFlash Interviews Douglas Kellner, Author of "Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election. (excerpt) Kellner: All of the scandals that George H.W. Bush had been involved in, S&L scandals, Iran-Contra, CIA scandals, none of this colorful family history was part of the media discourse during Election 2000. Whereas it's clear now that we see Bush as a President, he's a Bush family man, involved in a lot of family business connections like Enron and military adventures. Obviously Bush's father has played a big role in his life and Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, helped steal the election for him in Florida, so I think Bush family history is very, very significant and important, and it was almost completely overlooked, and continues to be.

    By the way, just as a brief sidetrack, the current Enron scandal I think is very closely related to the S&L scandal, with Bushes being involved in both of them. It was Bush I and Reagan who deregulated the banking and savings and loan industry in the eighties, and it was Texas friends of the Bush-Baker family that bought many of these savings and loans in Texas, including my own Lamar Savings, when I was teaching in Austin. And they basically looted and bankrupted them. The S&L crisis cost us over $500 billion dollars (with some recent estimates as high as $1.3 trillion!). Obviously, Neil Bush was one of the perpetrators of S&L fraud who was found guilty for his involvement in the Silverado S&L. Jeb Bush was allegedly implicated in a couple sleazy deals involving robbing HUD in housing scams and the national health system in some Medicare scams that he was allegedly associated with. And the media just didn't go into this. And they're still not getting into it despite the Enron scandal.

    See Also:

    Bush Family Value$. A 1992 "Mother Jones" article which examines Jeb's scandals and unanswered questions. (excerpt) A former federal prosecutor told Mother Jones that, when he looked into Jeb's lucrative business dealings with a now-fugitive [ex-partner], he considered two possibilities -- Jeb was either crooked or stupid. At the time, he concluded Jeb was merely stupid.

    Make the Money and Run. Jeb Bush followed the family game plan: Earn your fortune, then run for public office. A vast network of deals made it possible. 1998 article from the St. Petersburg Times chronicles eary Jeb Bush scandals.

     
  • At 6/03/2006 11:20:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    truth-pain - Gracias para visitar. Respondí en tu blog más temprano. Acabo de se dio cuenta de que yo no he ligado su blog para minar todavía. Haré ese derecho después de este comentario. (In a nutshell, thanks for visiting. And I realized just before I came into the comments window that I hadn't linked you're blog to mine. I shall do that right after I finish writing this comment.)

    betmo - I would love to see a woman president, but I agree with you. I don't think this country is ready yet. Also, its one of many things working against Hillary that would probably cost her the election (if she ran). I too love al gore, and I think he would make a good president. True, he might not be the next FDR or Abe Lincoln, but he'd still be a much better alternative to a Republican at this point. We do need him fighting for our environment, but wouldn't he be in a much better place to fight for it in the White House?

    Murtha might be a good candidate and yes his military experience would be priceless, but as you say, he's too old. Also, as I said to truth-pain, I think it's going to come down to Gore versus Hillary, and I hope he beats her out in the primaries.

    I agree with you on the fact that we need people with the capacity to clean up the mess left by Bush. Gore is against the war, and I believe that he could do a good job bringing the focus back to domestic issues, and away from foreign policies, like Iraq, that cost much money and cripple our own economy.

    5th estate - thanks for visiting :) and yes I have been a busy little bee. I hope you're right on both Jeb and Giuliani.

    It's not just the Bush family , it's who the republicans rely on and how they play the game to get into power.

    I definately agree. What Bush did to get power was disgusting. Not even counting the voting fiasco, his campaign was Kerry is bad, vote for me. He didn't come out strongly on Iraq or anything, yet still managed to put Kerry on the defensive. Kerry spent the whole campaign defending himself while Bush spent the whole campaign smearing him. Then the right managed to convince the American people that gays and terrorists were going to come and attack them unless they voted Republican. I have to admit that he did do a very good job of scaring the people to death. There were so may "threats" and so much talk of 9/11 that people saw Bush as the only answer to their problems, they were going to die...unless they voted for Bush. The issue of gay marriage, he acted like they were going to ruin the sacredness of marriage. How exactly? I know some gay people who are some of the nicest people I know. They were deeply offended by the whole issue. Taking these moral issues plus scaring the American people to death for political reasons is not right!

    politiques USA - proud to be the child. :)

    That was very interesting and informative. I'll read it over again tomorrow to make sure I got it all. It's very interesting to think about how similar Bush is to these others.

    The American defeat in Iraq will be a terrifying theological trauma, because it will be the public proof of the disowning of the nation of the chosen ones by the divinity.

    yes, the defeat in Iraq will be horrible for our country. I was saying previously in this comment to betmo that if Gore becomes president hopefully he can focus more on the domestic issues and take focus off Iraq. However, as truth-pain would probably say we have to take our minds off bashing bush and put them towards action. Yes, the war was bad...blah blah blah (I could go on for hours, but I won't, don't worry). However, we have to just accept the fact that we are at war and that we can't change that. If Gore or whoever the next president is takes toe focus off Iraq and switches it to domestic issues, that would mean a humiliating defeat in Iraq for the US. We went over there to basically as Bush said in Richard Clark's "Against All Enemies" that we're going to "kick some ass". This is what he said right after 9/11. Not, lets get the people who did this. And not specifically get the people in Afghanistan. He makes me sick. Back to taking action. If we were defeated in Iraq we would look weak to the world and aspring powers like China and India could take advantage of this. However, we really do need to get out of there. So, with an embarassing defeat we must leave, because I feel there is no way that we can successfully win. All we've managed to do is make more trouble. Bush's reign may just cripple the US and cost us our rank in the world as a superpower.

    w-dervish - Jeb Bush is a normal member of the bush clan. By that I mean he's corrupt just like the rest of them. I think there wouldn't be much difference between a "W" and a "Jeb" presidencey. Perhaps he'd be even worse!

    I definately agree with you. One of the many reasons why it would be horrible if Jeb became president. He'd probably have the same cabinet that Bush has now and the corporations would be taking all the money they could from the country, just like they are right now.

    All of the scandals that George H.W. Bush had been involved in, S&L scandals, Iran-Contra, CIA scandals, none of this colorful family history was part of the media discourse during Election 2000.

    All of those scandals that Jeb was involved in should add bagagge to him and he shouldn't be able to run because of them. However, just as these scandals weren't mentioned in 2000, the Republicans could maneuver around the mention of Jeb's scandals. I doubt it because he has a lot against him. However the repubs are very VERY smart...at least Karl Rove is (cause we all know Bushie isn't). :)

     
  • At 6/03/2006 11:51:00 PM, Blogger billie said…

    i would hope that everyone has figured out now that cheney, rumsfeld and rove are actually running the country. bush, while still complicit, is just the frontman. they chose him for name recognition and because he looks like poppa bush. also, his baggage wasn't as detrimental as jeb or neil- or any of the others actually- would have been. rove is a skillful manipulator but his tactics are old- and we are forewarned- therefore forearmed. i don't think al gore will try for the presidency. hillary- perhaps- but i think that she knows at this point that it would be political suicide. i hope she recognizes it. 2016 maybe. not this time. keep your focus on the real issues- check out citizen against lies recent post- and don't get caught up in the gay thing or immigration thing or abortion thing. all smokescreen issues no matter how low a blow they are.

     
  • At 6/04/2006 12:09:00 AM, Blogger Ellie said…

    I think people are realizing that Bush is just a bobble head. and yes, Karl Rove's tactics are old, but they worked in 2000 and 2004. Yes, Neil and Jeb have more baggage, but you never know. I don't think Neil will ever run because I think it is pretty widely known that he is a crook. Jeb on the other hand is known more as the Governor of Florida. Of course he hasn't done much, but that doesn't seem to matter. I could see hillary running. Although it might be political suicide she's very ambitious and she really wants to be president. However, she didn't run in 2004, so maybe she will wait 4 or even 8 more years. I doubt it though.

     
  • At 6/04/2006 10:54:00 PM, Blogger steven rix said…

    Just think about the post. It's called philo-anthropology and it does not exist in the US. It's a french discipline based on the darwinism.

    Later on I will give you the address of the author, he is a buddy of mine. He lives in France, worked for the newspaper Le Monde and he is almost 80 years old now.

     
  • At 6/05/2006 11:32:00 PM, Blogger Ellie said…

    I'll read it over a few more times and think about it more when I have some more time. Right now things are kind of crazy. I would like to discuss it, maybe in a few days when things lighten up a little. Thank you so much, that would be a great resource.

     

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