Bush Offers High Honors for Profound Failures

The world depicted by George Orwell in 1984 continues in imperial Washington. Earlier this week, Bush offered high honors for profound failures, with his bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on:

- Tommy Franks, the former CentCom commander, who allowed Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora;
- George Tenet, former CIA director, who jumped on the bandwagon for the Iraq war, informing Bush that the WMD claims were "a slam dunk";
- Paul Bremer, former chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, who disbanded the Iraqi army, among other blunders.

Failure is celebrated as success in the American Empire. As Orwell said, “Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.”

These days, there is no chance of such a revolutionary act in America – not with such a docile public ready to accept everything served up by AOL Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and Viacom.

The ludicrous unravelling of the nomination of former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik as secretary of Homeland Security further illustrates the Bush administration's methods.

The fact that Kerik neglected to pay taxes on a nanny who was an illegal immigrant was a convenient alibi. Beyond his extramarital affairs, secret marriage and love nests, he appears also to be married to the mob - on the take from the Gambino crime family. Yet Bush had been attracted to Kerik's Rambo-like aggression; the White House vetting process seems to be as credulous as the Mickey Mouse Club; and the impulse to cover up instant.

The fall guy is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, Kerik's patron. Inadvertently, Giuliani's tainting eliminates him as a moderate Republican pretender to the throne. If only Kerik's foibles had passed beneath the radar, he might have been honored for any calamity.

Does this really surprise anyone?

According to Dr. Gerry Lower of Keystone, South Dakota – a contributor to Axis of Logic, “Americans are - among countries - the least Christian, the least decent, the least compassionate, the least kind government on the globe. Nowhere else can I think of does greed, power, corruption, vengeance, bigotry, and hatred more rule the day under the guise of Christianity and democracy than in the United States. Other nations with "Christian" traditions, like Germany, France, Italy, and England, at least have basic health care for their people and abhor the death penalty.

America under George Bush is dishonesty, ignorance, self-righteousness and belligerence personified. We are like the guy who has conquered dozens of women ... proud of himself in the midst of sin, thinking he is on top of manhood while residing on the very bottom. What is this, if not uneducated adolescence?

For all his unworthy pomp and power, George Bush is nothing but a puppet "anti-Christ" in the strings of right wing religious fundamentalists, who in turn maintain Constantine's JudeoRoman lie, his perverted fusion of Old Testament and Roman legalism with Christianity to produce New Testament self-righteous conquest in the name of compassion.

It is this millennial religious duping of the people that has brought us to where we are, from tribal to national to global human organization, good people doing bad things in the name of a larger good. That lie was an evolutionary inevitability with the emergence of Christian philosophy in an ancient despotic world. That lie, and the conquest-bent attitudes it has nourished, have blindly promoted the exponential economic unification of the world's people and set the stage for the emergence of a global political philosophy.

George Bush and his puppeteers and followers are religiously incorrigible, transcendent of human knowledge and logic, above rethinking anything which they already know with religious certainty. There will be no stopping the cultural imperative which they have currently put in place.

America is, among the western democracies, the least well-educated, most shallow, least intellectual, most ignorant, least thoughtful, most self-righteous, least honest, most deceitful, least spiritual and most destructive.

Americans are the least family-oriented, least community-oriented, least democracy-oriented nation in the western world. We have become, under Bush's watch, just another wretched religious nation, justifying whatever we please by employing the authority of the Christian Bible.”