Timothy Martin Flanagan:  Facilitator at www.ActiveResource.org/

" A state which enslaves others cannot herself be free."
 
 

   In another time...  in the Senate House, 23 dagger
   wounds ended the bloody career of Julius Caesar. 
   His insane ambitions and reckless abandon
   cost 160,000 Roman lives.
  
   Famous leaders may as easily be evil as be possessed of goodness.  Mostly, rulers of the world succumb to egotistical  ambitions and reckless whims... regardless of their own perceptions of their morality or lack thereof.

Often, according to Edward Gibbon, one can find the best measure of a man according to all the good things said him by his enemies and all bad things said about him by his friends. 

George Bush shares the peculiar arrogance which typified Constantine's Christiandom,         
as well as Charlemagne's' misguided disdain for his people. 
By ignoring the lessons of history, Mr. Bush has sealed his fate... and ours.  

"A union of nations cannot be cemented with the blood of
 slaughtered men.  Conquest produces hatred, hatred flames into revenge, and revenge results in destruction."
                                                         (Henry Thomas)

 Bush's ham-handed neo-colonialism has come full circle.  The conquered become the rebels, the rebels become the new conquerors, and the unholy circle is completed at the point from which it started.  In the meantime, untold hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars are lost, and nothing is gained but enmity, regret, and the tragic decline of an empire...

Stubborn refusal to make course corrections, delusion, denial, and ignorance
have made a bad situation worse. 

How could this happen?  One might remember Kublai Khan. 

Some of our people, befuddled by traditionalism, and driven by hypnotic fascination to believe implicitly in a leader who implicitly believed in himself, were ready, like Khan's subjects, to follow him, to toil for him, and to die for him like dumb, driven cattle.  With all the volition of lemmings... 

Perhaps, if we are fortunate, Bush and his henchmen, like Khan... will be thrust from power.  And our people, newly liberated, can once more return to a rule of law under the authority of the constitution.  However, our nation is less wise and far younger than the Chinese empire.  And while Khan became a brief, insignificant, and half- forgotten chapter in that nations history, Mr. Bush and
his band of corporate felons have inflicted such damages that their scourge
will curse this nation for most of the next century. 

Now perhaps those who compare Bush to Hitler protest too much... but other leaders have provided models of the hubris which has ended Bush's fantasy.

Louis XIV comes to mind.  He showed nothing but contempt for his subjects.
Louis, like George, gloried in war and was proficient in the art of propaganda.  During his bloody conquest, brutality, stupidity, and fraud were perpetrated under the name of military glory. 

King Louis, like would-be-king George... considered himself a devout Christian.  But both men were mistaken.  Louis' intolerance and hypocrisy established a nationwide discontent.  While the discontent in our recent elections is certainly less profound, the message is clear.  The American people understand Mr. Bush has no compassion for the working man...  and they, along with history, will have little affection for George.   

And if George Bush and Adolph Hitler, as world leaders, might be compared...  the comparison is weak.  Hitler was a force of evil, while George is only his father's dry drunk of a son.  Yet both, in their own ways, brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. There are some parallels.  Hitler's life, before his rise to prominence, like George, was not much more than a series of pathetic defeats.   While George shares Hitler's frustration, hunger for profit through illegal methods, insensibility to the suffering of others, bluster, and passion for power...  Hitler was indeed more hateful, beastial , cruel, and cunning.  Both are gangster archetypes, but Hitler was clearly more dangerous and more dangerously disturbed.  They did share enthusiasm for serial warfare. 

But while Mr. Bush is no Hitler, and may not be as implacable, blind, unreasoning, immoral, and destructive...  in less than eight years his feckless ignorance has undone this nation, lost credibility, destroyed our reputation, and taken us down the road to ruin. 

Mr. Bush and his ilk have undermined the richest and most powerful nation on earth, in spite of his not being as lunatic, unordinary, cataclysmic, or terrible as
the Furor.  While Hitler, with evil genius, produced the most devastating air fleet, formidable tank force, and the most ruthless army of killers in the world...
Bush, through dumb insouciance and unmitigated gall, failed our people, betrayed those who backed him, and took our nation from peace, prosperity, and promise....  to endless war, skyrocketing deficits, and irrevocable decline.

Good riddance, Mr. Bush.   It is a measure of your malfeasance, that you may not even be cogent of how horribly you have wounded this nation while failing in your duties.  The dustbins of history are the least you deserve for your truculence, treason, and terrible incompetence.  Any true justice would demand, according to your crimes, that you spend some number of years in prison.  While justice may indeed be deferred, it is reasonable to imagine that some part of justice will certainly not be denied. 

Tim Flanagan