WHITE HOUSE

Bydavid SCHULTZ

Nat PARRY
The liberal rehabilitation of George W. Bush is now virtually complete, with his successor Barack Obama declaring this week that the 43rd president was committed to the rule of law, despite all evidence to the contrary. In an online fundraiser for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden Tuesday night, Obama stated that Bush “had a basic regard for the rule of law and the importance of our institutions of democracy.”

History has always treated harshly those tyrants and strongmen who have been gratuitously violent toward their subjects and citizens and believed in purposely creating misery for their charge. Donald John Trump, the third impeached president of the United States, decided to clear peaceful protesters gathered a full block from the White House, so he could have his photograph taken standing in front of a church. It was not any church, but St. John’s Episcopal Church, dubbed the “Church of the Presidents,” owing to the several chief executives who have worshiped there over the decades.

When in trouble politically, governments have traditionally conjured up a foreign enemy to explain why things are going wrong. Whatever one chooses to believe about the coronavirus, the fact is that it has resulted in considerable political backlash against a number of governments whose behavior has been perceived as either too extreme or too dilatory. Donald Trump’s White House has taken shots from both directions and the response to the disease has also been pilloried due to repeated gaffes by the president himself.

It is perhaps inevitable that a major health panic like the coronavirus will have political ramifications based on whether those most affected by the illness will perceive that the government performed well or poorly in the crisis. The government for its part will engage in a blame game which seeks to place responsibility for what did not go well on an outside party.

The anti-science, conspiracy-driven, and radical right-wing agenda of the Trump administration has directly led to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans and foreign citizens amid the worst pandemic to strike the world since the 1918 influenza scourge. Like any fascist tyrant, Trump requires scapegoats to maintain his power base and he has discovered plenty of them.

In the Soviet Union there was an expression “The Organs of State Security” or “Organs” for short. Their supposed power in the USSR was one of the things that separated them from what we used to call “the free world”. Not so much any more – the American Organs came very close to getting rid of the so-called Most Powerful Man in The World. They made only one mistake; they probably won’t next time.

There is certain wisdom to the statement that “no one is truly qualified to be President”. The leader of the United States (or any other country) should in theory have an expert level of knowledge in all the areas of society that the government is responsible for. This is a wide variety of issues from the military, to healthcare, to road infrastructure to agriculture. The leader with the veto hammer should know it all and not only that but be an incredible public speaker with a good sense of humor that works for a wide audience and be at least six feet tall.

The United States has been at war almost continuously since the founding of the nation in 1783. Some of the wars were undeclared like the centuries-long eradication of the native Americans, while others – the Mexican and Spanish-American wars – were glorified by including the names of the countries defeated by Washington’s war machine. America’s bloodiest war actually has multiple names, including the Civil War, the War Between the States, The War of the Rebellion and the War of Northern Aggression, allowing one to pick and choose reflecting one’s own political preferences.

Eric Zuesse
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