Friday, Jan 30th
Last update10:32:28 PM GMT
Political Glance
The key to understanding George W Bush is understanding his almost psychotic fear of failure and humiliation which causes him to avoid reality at all costs and drives his messianic behavior and agenda ~ much like it did Hitler's in the 1930's.
The key to understanding George W Bush is recognizing his deep fear of failure and humiliation which he constantly felt and supressed as a child ~ and he is still emotionally stuck there today.
“He has been a total thug in overthrowing a democratic government in Haiti and supporting the death squads and murderers there, and in pursuing a war of aggression in Iraq,” Parenti writes.“
He (Bush) unilaterally has announced that the U.S. will be held to none of the international treaties that it has signed, that no strictures of international law will inhibit foreign policy, and that the U.S. reserves the right to act as it will on its own accord, according to its own interests, and the limitations of its own power,” Parenti points out.“
The U.S. will,” he goes on to say, “of itself, decide unilaterally what countries it will attack, when, and for what reasons,” a policy he adds that has “caused such an alarm throughout the world that people have demonstrated massively…”
Parenti said the Iraqi war has given President Bush “the opportunity to clamp down on dissent at home, to intimidate, and to accumulate more power.”
An aide to President Bush has resigned because of his alleged misuse of grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development when he worked for a Cuban democracy organization.
"Mr. Sixto allegedly had a conflict of interest with the use of USAID funds by his former employer," Stanzel said, adding that he did not know how much money was involved or the particulars of the allegations.
Five years after Bush's ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.
Among U.S. historians, it has become great sport to rank the country's presidents. Bush vies with many for the title of absolute worst – from Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw a post-Civil War era so corrupt it was known as Grant's Barbecue, to Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, to Herbert Hoover, the hapless president in charge during the stock market crash of 1929.
But Grant, Hoover and even Nixon did not do as much damage worldwide. Americans may still be debating Bush's legacy. I suspect the rest of the world has made up its mind.
House Democrats demanded documents Thursday about a multibillion-dollar overseas contracting loophole to track down how _ and why _ the Bush administration slipped it into plans to protect taxpayer money.
The controversial loophole has irked Democrats and Republicans alike. But it has the support of a trade association that lobbies on behalf of giant global government contractors, including Blackwater USA, KBR Inc., Boeing Co., CACI International Inc. and Lockheed Martin.
Former White House adviser Lewis “Scooter” Libby, convicted last year for lying to a grand jury and federal agents probing the leak of a CIA agent’s identity, was disbarred from practicing law in the nation’s capital on Thursday.
They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of President Bush's two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have also sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or leased to private firms and used by motorists for a price. In Duvall and Gribbin's view, unleashing the private sector and introducing market forces could lead to innovation and more choices for the public, much as the breakup of AT&T transformed telecommunications.
But their ideas and actions have alarmed transit advocates, the trucking industry, states struggling to build rail projects and members of Congress from both parties.
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