George W. Bush's Crusade against Islam

Why on earth is there anyone in this country anywhere still defending the Bush Administration on anything? Here it is, we are nearly a half-year into a new Administration, and I'd much prefer to put my energies into things like why all of a sudden Barack Obama is now afraid to touch the very words "single payer" with a 10-foot pole?

I wonder just how long the atrocities of the Bush Administration are going to continue to shock and appall us. But as long as official Washington is loath to bring these criminals to justice at the same time as they're sending 22-year-old potsmokers to jail, I guess we'll have to continue with our hapless and pointless moral outrage. Because if we stop that and say, Peggy Noonan-like, that we should just "keep walking", who's to say what the next Republican psychopath who manages to exploit the fears of a coddled nation is going to do?

What kind of a media environment do we have when Orrin Hatch is unchallenged when he claims that "empathy" is code for "activist judges" and the release of memos sent by Donald Rumsfeld to George W. Bush has to be done by GQ Magazine?

Robert Draper reports:

on the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.”

Much more here.

The picture that I'm getting from this release, as well as from the unfolding story about how torture techniques were approved, was that what we had for eight years was an amoral president, an inattentive wastrel for whom every day was a struggle against hitting the bottle again, with an addiction to Jesus replacing an addiction to liquor -- with Cheney and Rumsfeld as the front men. They fed his dependency with Crusades imagery to keep him -- not that he would have anyway -- from asking any questions about what they were doing. In case the "He tried to kill my daddy" issue didn't hold enough water, or the "If I get Saddam it means my dick is bigger than my daddy's" undercurrent didn't quite work, there was always a Crusade for Jesus to fall back on.

We don't want to go there? We don't want to look back and see what we allowed these people to do for eight years? We can't afford NOT to go there. We sold our national soul to these men because Americans were afraid. Penitence and reflection is the only way to get it back.