Note: This statement is made in relation to the former president and the current President Obama. There are some who have come before and some who will probably come after who are greater threats to our liberty.
Last night after walking out on the Nightly News (I figured I’d be kicked out of the room anyways…for my adamant yelling at the TV screen) I made the extraordinary statement that Bush was a far worse president than President Obama. After reflection I realize that it wasn’t all that extraordinary, but it sounds better that way, doesn’t it? So I had to explain this puzzling statement to my audience, namely, my mother. Bush and Obama are both wolves, but Bush is in sheep’s clothing, so he’s obviously more dangerous, with such a clever disguise. Just think about it. You won’t hear any pro-lifers protest the innocent blood shed in the Mideast to find the elusive and paradoxical Bin Ladin who is sometimes captured, sometimes killed, and sometimes prowling the world to murder Americans because we are free. You won’t hear the conservative pro-lifers protesting the killing of babies, children, women, and elderly folks in other countries…because of our invasive and out-of-control wars. You will hear the conservatives and Tea Partiers longing for the “good old days” when we had such a nice-looking, kind, compassionate, Christian president. Never mind that he instigated the murdering of thousands. Never mind that he was responsible for one of the most intrusive bills that have nearly entirely stripped away the Bill of Rights and given the government unlimited power to watch, search, arrest, and detain Americans, the Patriot Act. Never mind that he didn’t really make the government smaller and decrease spending. Never mind that he didn’t lower the taxes. But those were the good old days…I find it interesting to compare Bush and Obama. The former is as American as American can get. His nice accent, his down-to-earth-ness…”here is one of us,” in other words. And on the other hand you have Obama who, as we recently discovered from his trip, grew up in Indonesia and probably relates to that culture more than the American culture. Lest I be called a xenophobe, let me explain. It really makes no difference to me, I don’t think Bush is superior to Obama because he grew up here. I don’t care where a president grew up, if for the sole reason that I don’t want a president.
And I wonder if somehow Bush is actually the model American, in all he does and all he says. Not the American of the American Revolution, for that’d be Ron Paul. But perhaps Bush is the manifestation of all that is truly modern America. This “modern” mindset goes back to the dear President Teddy Roosevelt…and probably even farther back to Lincoln. This mindset that we know what is best for all people in all places and times, that it is our duty, even our God-given duty to make everyone do just as we believe they ought to do. From Prohibition to the War in Iraq, this self-righteous, “I’m better than you, so you must listen to me, and if you don’t, look at all my guns and tanks…” has pervaded our culture. I don’t think it is done on purpose. I think that the average American has good intentions, and only those at the very top realize what is going on. We probably have some of that “City on the Hill” stuff left over, secularized and kidnapped by the government. It is the mindset that America is better than the rest of the world. This type of talking makes me very upset. I’ve never even traveled outside the United States. This anger isn’t based on my own personal experience. It is based on the knowledge that America has some very grave faults and that no one can claim that their country is better than another. What are your standards? What is your criterion for judging? And these standards are purely subjective, they differ from person to person. Contrary to popular belief, God did not give His special “approval” to America so that somehow everything we do becomes a mission on behalf of God. “This is God’s special nation, so we can go to other countries and kill their people.” People point to the miraculous interventions of God during the founding of our nation to support their beliefs. But have they bothered to check up on the founding of all the other nations in the world? We might find some similar interventions by God, I simply don’t know. And even if God did play a special and unique role in the founding of our nation, does that give us the right now to do those things which are universally recognized as being wrong? The Old Testament Israelites got express directions from God to do what they did. As far as I know, God didn’t speak to America and tell us to go out into all the world and make them live as nicely as we do.
So that’s why I think Bush epitomizes modern America. And that’s why he’s so dangerous, because he mentions God, and has a good family, and stopped drinking when he was 40, and all those things that make him so much like us hide the hard and tragic truth that Bush is in fact a wolf and is one of the most anti-life presidents we’ve had in the last 20 years. But I think Americans are afraid of realizing this truth and discovering, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
