A little noted victim of Bush's tyranny: the individual conscience

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

Among Bush's many crimes is one that few have written about. Bush has required of our soldiers that they violate their own consciences. And, at the end of the day, it is either a strong individual or a hopeless kiss up who can say that they served Bush in Iraq without violating or burying forever their own moral code. On the home front, support for Bush on any issue has now become a Faustian bargain. At stake is your very soul, or, less theologically, the individual conscience. This is one of the defining characteristics of dictatorship.

George W. Bush: An American Hitler

In George W. Bush's petty, pathetic, partisan world, laws he doesn't agree with don't have to be obeyed, Congressional actions that differ from his political agenda can be ignored and the Constitution of the United States is just a "goddamned piece of paper."

Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe brought this point home Sunday when he revealed Bush has chosen to ignore more laws passed by Congress than any President in history, appending more than 750 laws with "signing statements" that say, in effect, that he doesn't give a damn what the law says because he will do whatever he pleases as a "wartime president" and "commander-in-chief."

Of course it doesn't matter to him that he became a "wartime president" because he lied out his ass to justify an illegal invasion on Iraq based on fake intelligence and a determined policy of ignoring facts that disproved his lies. ...

As I had written earlier: the Bush administration is no longer a "presidency", it's a criminal conspiracy. An increasing number of astute observers have emailed me advocating that Bush and his regime be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Make no mistake —the Bush regime has become a tyranny. The first victim of tyranny is the individual conscience.

As individuals act upon what they believe to be true, a people does so collectively. American hubris, self-importance, and self-appointed moral superiority are, like all falsehoods, the source of much evil throughout the world; and it is all the more egregious that those evils are manifested recently under the worst American presidency in our history.

Aggressive war, torture, duplicity, deliberate deceptions, the abrogation of the very instruments by which Americans instituted the rule of law —all are hallmarks of this Bush "administration", best described as a criminal conspiracy to undermine the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law.

We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson's first secretary of state, described the United States as "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another 30 to 40 years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us. ...

—Exporting the American Model

Of course, Bush KNOWS that making the middle east safe for Democracy is absolute, right wing crap! A party that has to resort to election theft in its own country is hardly in a position to propose "free elections" in another.

A ruthless dictator who abjures the Constitution in America is hardly in a position to demonize Saddam Hussein.

A lawless bigot in the White House is hardly in a position to talk about the blessings of democracy if they could but wipe out those mean ol' "turrsts" in Iraq!

As more and more is learned about Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, the torture flights and cold blooded murders of civilians by U.S. troops, I've concluded that the war against Iraq was not even about oil, though Bush's base —the robber barons of big oil —have profited exponentially!

There are no rational explanations for continuing to perpetrate the counter productive policies of bluster, aggressive war, war crimes, torture, and murder. Therefore, Bush's real reasons for attacking and waging an ongoing war crime in Iraq are personal. Bush, a known alumnus of the super secretive Illuminati society called Skull and Bones, apparently just wants to get his jollies by murdering folk by proxy. For Bush's base of oil oligarchs, it's about the plunder of oil; but for Bush it's about the psychotic perversions of an out of control maniac in the White House.

A related update:

Dear President Bush; about that "goddamned piece of paper."

“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

Let us start out with the fact that the Constitution is actually written on parchment, not paper. A trivial point, I grant you, but one that reveals (along with your inability to correctly pronounce the word "nuclear") a shocking lack of education in a head of state.

But to get to the point, the Constitution is not the parchment itself, but the ideas written upon it; ideas which form the foundations of our nation, ideas which would carry equal weight if written on stone, glass, metal, or even paper. These ideas are the soul of the nation. They include the recognition that the people of this nation have certain rights, rights which the government does not have the authority to remove. These rights include freedom of speech, to say what we think about the nation at any and all times, to write that opinion down and share it however we choose to. These rights include the freedom to worship as we choose, free from coercion. These rights include the right to privacy, in our homes and businesses, free from government intrusions other than in very specific and well-defined circumstances.

Maybe those rights are inconvenient to you, as such rights are always inconvenient to tyrants, but you are not allowed the choice which rights you will abide by or not. That too is spelled out explicitly in the Constitution. ...

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