Near the end of President “I’m the decider” Bush’s press conference yesterday, he said something interesting.
I’m like any other political figure. Everybody wants to be loved — just sometimes the decisions you make and the consequences don’t enable you to be loved. And so, when it’s all said and done, if you ever come down and visit the old, tired me down there in Crawford, I will be able to say, I looked in the mirror and made decisions based upon principle, not based upon politics. And that’s important to me.
If you believe, as many do, that Bush is a dolt, then you can take his above statement at face value and give the man some credit for having convictions.
On the other hand, if he’s something more than a frat boy gone bad, if he is in fact a calculating, semi-intelligent member of the American aristocracy–and I believe he is–then we must examine which convictions he refers to. Is it his desire to make his buddies in the military industrial complex, of which the oil industry is front and center, rich beyond compare? That’s a good bet.
With the possible exception of WWI and WWII, the United States doesn’t enter wars for idealogical reasons. I know that may sound shocking, but a close analysis of American history resolves the question. We enter wars for financial gain, pure and simple. Given that, Bush can pound his fist and make faces all he wants, while telling “the people” about his noble fight for a democratic Middle East. It simply isn’t believable. There’s too much evidence to the contrary. Not on TV. In books and well-researched print articles from serious journalists like Greg Palast.
I’ll give him this, Bush does not play politics. His reign has shown that politics–that tired old system whereby consensus is sought–matters not. This man, and the peolpe he is surrounded by, have no concern whatsoever for the American people, nor the people of the world. His rhetoric about democracy is a joke. Given that we don’t have a democracy at home, how could we possibly export such a system abroad?