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Bush and the Seven Deadly Sins
by
Mina Hamilton
Dissident Voice
May
29, 2003
George
is a born-again Christian. He
frequently stresses his piety, starts Cabinet meetings with a prayer and reads
the Bible every day.
Ever
since the 6th century when Pope Gregory the Great catalogued the Seven Deadly
Sins, Christians have said the Sins are fatal to spiritual development. Does Bush want to avoid these moral
pitfalls? What's our pious President's
score card here?
Sloth: Bush is an odd combination of both sloth and
frenetic activity. Before 9/11 Bush
frequently boasted how he hated being in Washington. Translation: He preferred
being out on the golf links, jogging, or posing with a chain saw down on the
ranch in Crawford, to which he retreated once every six or seven weeks. He readily admitted that he never worked on
Saturday or Sunday and jokingly referred to his afternoon naps. Furthermore, he frequently cut out of
Washington at 1 or 2 PM on Fridays. He
wanted to get down to Camp David on a timely basis. By August 2001 he had
racked up more vacation days than any other sitting US President.
After
9/11 this all changed. Bush, shocked
and enraged by the WTC tragedy, became a more hands-on President. The goofy
jokester was out, the firm, meting-out-justice leader was in. An interesting detail recounted by
journalist Bob Woodward shows how even Dick Cheney was surprised by Dubya's new
role. On the day after the attack,
September 12, Cheney suggests to Bush that "someone" should chair the
National Security Council meetings, do up summaries and pass them along to Bush
for decisions. (One wonders was Cheney
thinking the "someone" would be himself?) Bush says no thanks; I'll
chair the meetings myself. And he did. (1)
Despite
his new commander-in-chief-father-protector role, clearly Bush still wasn't up
for the intellectually demanding policy work of a Wolfowitz or Perle. And it's hard to imagine Bush working an
eight-hour day, much less the 11 or 12-hour days many Americans put in on boring
and unimportant jobs.
There's
one situation where Bush has boundless energy.
He loves to hustle up his friends, loves to raise money, loves to
campaign. Bush surprised his staff by
launching his 1994 campaign for the governorship of Texas with a swing through
27 cities in 5 days. (2) Dubya's similar campaign blitz in
2002 helped to deliver the US Congress to the Republicans.
Warning:
Freed up of normal Presidential duties by his shadow government of Rove, Cheney
et al, Bush has time on his hands.
He'll campaign incessantly from now til November 2004. Already in May 2003 he pulled in $22 million
for the Republican Party and he has an ambitious fundraising agenda scheduled
for the next couple of months.
Pride: The Smirk says it all. Case closed. (I bet Bush's handlers do some work on this one. After much coaching, the Prez comes out onto
the 2004 Campaign Trail with a less condescending grin.)
Greed: Ann Richards, the Democratic Governor of
Texas whom George unseated in 1994, once said George Sr. was "born with a
silver foot in his mouth." (3) George Jr. continues
the family tradition. But that didn't
stop him from wanting his very own millions.
Back
in 1989, Bush hauled in the moolah on the stadium built in Arlington, Texas for
the Texas Rangers. What's interesting
about this one is that the Texas legislature passed a bill allowing the private
corporation that owned the Rangers to exercise eminent domain, normally a power
reserved for public entities.
We're
all pretty familiar with condemnation for public projects. It's what the Army Corps of Engineers does
to build flood-control dams or Municipalities do to construct water mains or
Highway Authorities do to obtain rights-of-way. In the Texas Rangers case the condemnation was on behalf of a
handful of private individuals, one of whom was George W.
This
surprising form of socialism with baseball teams condemning private property
for new stadiums is now quite common in the US. It had a particularly sordid ring in the Texas deal.
This
private corporation condemned not only enough land for a spanking new baseball
stadium, but also took an additional 300 acres - yes 300 acres - of surrounding
land for commercial development.
Arlington residents floated most of the package with jacked-up
taxes. These paid for the bonds needed
to buy the land. It seems that our
no-tax President wasn't ideologically opposed to increasing taxes if it padded
his own bank account.
The
padding was generous: Bush made out like a bandit with his initial investment
of $640,000 zooming to a cool $15.4 million in 1998 when he sold out. (4)
A
similar type of socialism for the rich is planned for Iraq. US taxpayers fund the war, George's cronies
and benefactors mop up on juicy reconstruction contracts and then the CEO's of
Halliburton, Bechtel, and other post-Saddam beneficiaries direct vast sums back
into the Bush/GOP campaign war chest.
A
similar scheme is shaping up in the plan for Iraq's national resource, oil,
with private US companies taking over this extraordinarily valuable Iraqi asset
- and funneling money back into Bush's and the Republican Party's deep
pockets. In the last Federal election,
Bush got more money from the oil and gas industry - $1.8 million - than any
other federal candidate over the last decade. (5)
Envy: Ram Dass, the meditation guru, once
described standing in an airport hanger with a Rockefeller. The Rockefeller was standing along side his
spanking new private Lear Jet, but he wasn't proud or happy. He was gnashing his teeth. Adjacent to his plane was a much bigger (and
presumably better) jet, owned by his uncle.
It's
hard for us lowly five-figure-salary folk to get it. The wealthy never have enough; they're always envious. (Otherwise they wouldn't be lusting after
those additional millions.) Who knows
what Bush's particular envy is? It
might be a bigger jet, a larger ranch, or a taller skyscraper. The Prez certainly adds the twist of
desiring more bombs, more wars, more subject states, more empire.
It's
not just money and goods that the Prez covets.
The way he rants on about the Eastern Establishment, you've got to
wonder if he isn't envious of the intellectual snobs he so chronically
condemns. Those were the people who
were actually studying at Andover and Yale while he was assing off, boozing,
cheerleading and hazing.
A
little known detail of his stint as head of his Yale fraternity, Delta Kappa
Epsilon, supports this view. What
happened? The press got wind of a
sadistic hazing technique where frat candidates were branded on the butt with a
red-hot coat hanger. Does that sound
like a resentful, Texas-cowboy caper or what?
Bush leapt to the branding's defense saying it was no worse than a
cigarette burn. (Funny, where I come
from cigarette burns on naked flesh are a form of torture, but I must have been
reading some Amnesty International rag.)
Bush
is extremely competitive. It would be
surprising if Bush weren't envious of other people's brains, particularly Karl
Rove's. Bush is known for his habit of
giving everybody around him nicknames, often nasty ones. He dubbed Rove "Turd Blossom." (6) Doubtless this says something about the underhand,
"dirty tricks" campaign tactics Rove is known for, but Turd Blossom?
Dubya
just can't keep his possessions in their proper location. His oil pops up underneath Iraq's sand, his
brain appears in the unprepossessing corpus of Rove.
Lust: The jury's still out on this one. Given Dubya's hard-drinking, frat days it's
hard to imagine that he hasn't come in for his share of womanizing. Bush, however, has a clever defense against
any scrutiny of his past: he's born again.
Since he has a fresh, new character anything he did in his wayward youth
is irrelevant and unimportant.
Gluttony: The pretzel caper says it all: How many US
Presidents have gobbled food so fast that they choked and passed out?
Then
there's the matter of booze. Dubya once
said he liked the four B's: beer, bourbon and B&B. One friend said he was "close to the
line" of being "clinically" an alcoholic. (7)
Supposedly that all ended in 1986 when he turned 40 and pledged to stop
drinking.
Problem:
In 1987, one year after he had given up drinking he ran into Al Hunt, a Wall
Street Journal editor who was minding his own business sitting at a restaurant
with his wife and 4-year-old daughter.
Bush
lit into him, saying, among other things, "You no-good fucking son of a
bitch, I will never fucking forget what you wrote." (8)
(Hunt had predicted that the 1988 Republican ticket would be Jack Kemp and
Richard Lugar, instead of George Bush Sr and Dan Quayle.) What's interesting is that the Wall St
Journal editor later commented that Bush was well "lubricated." (9)
Second
problem: In 1992, six years after he
made his pledge to stop drinking, Bush was caught on a video of wedding where
he also appeared to be drunk. (10)
Whether
these two slips were isolated incidents of drunkenness or are indicative that
the pledge to give up drinking isn't ironclad must be one of the most fiercely
guarded secrets in the White House.
Another
form of gluttony: Excessive consumption
of the globe's resources. All that
boosting of more and more oil consumption is gluttony par excellence,
particularly when your oil stocks are zooming higher and higher. Bush practices gluttony on behalf of his
corporate friends too. He pushes for
tax credits for SUV's, opens up wilderness areas for more mining, welcomes the
timber barons into the Tongass National Forest, and aims his sites on the Artic
National Wildlife Refuge. He promotes
bigger and bigger military budgets. All
of these activities produce tidy millions for businessmen that will turn around
and reward Dubya with big campaign donations.
Wrath: Any biography of Bush makes it clear;
insiders know the temper tantrum Bush aimed at the Wall St. Journal writer, Al
Hunt, was not atypical. The 100-plus
people executed in Texas during Bush's governorship shared this knowledge on a
deep, visceral level. As do the unknown
numbers of Muslims, Arabs, Pakistanis and others of wrong skin color or suspect
nationality that are still disappeared almost two years after 9/11.
A
nasty, revengeful side emerges whenever Bush talks about the death
penalty. Here his acts and words line
up (often not the case with the Prez).
In Texas, he nixed a bill prohibiting the use of the death penalty
against mentally retarded criminals.
During one of the Presidential debates his face lit up with a pleasant
glow, a "look of pleasure" when he discussed the execution of the
murderers of James Byrd. (11)
The
Bush/Ashcroft plan for military tribunals replete with no public record, no
jury (except for military brass) and sessions behind closed doors - possibly in
undisclosed, offshore locations - is totally consistent with Bush's vindictive
nature.
Bush's
revengeful nature is also repeated on the larger scale of foreign policy. What
could be more wrathful than raining cluster bombs, depleted uranium and bunker
busters down on innocent civilians in Iraq?
What could be more furious than incinerating Iraqis in their
automobiles, market places and apartments?
What could be more rageful than pulverizing Afghanistan and then
abandoning the country to warlords and the rapidly returning Taliban?
What
could be more full of ire than Bush smacking his desk and gloating, "It
feels good" as the bombs fall on one of the poorest, weakest countries on
the planet? (12)
Miller
argues that Bush is a deeply angry man.
He describes how at college Bush blew-off all the major altruistic
movements of the Sixties. Bush had no
interest in the civil rights movement, no interest in women's rights, no
interest in the Vietnam War. He was a
"careless Bourbon among Jacobins." (13)
The
way Bush cavalierly dismissed the extraordinary global outpouring of anti-war
sentiment on February 15, 2003 is cut from the same cloth. Comparing this seminal day with a
"focus group" is extraordinarily hostile. Equally wrathful is Bush's willingness to trivialize the world's
yearning for peace, for social justice, for democracy, and for international
cooperation.
Sloth,
gluttony, pride, wrath, envy, greed, the Prez has them all. As far as the Seven Deadly Sins go, Dubya
doesn't even get a gentleman's C.
If
this is the morality of a born-again Christian, I shudder. Few Christians would now believe the
Medieval Church's luridly imagined punishments for the Seven Deadly Sins, such
as being boiled in oil, broken over wheels or skewered with pitchforks.
My
preferred punishment: Install a punch
clock in the Oval Office. Require Bush
to read Howard Zinn's, A People's History, and I mean actually read (not just
pretend to read as he does with the various books his handlers get him to
conspicuously tuck under his elbow).
Top the punishment off with two years of community service in a soup
kitchen or homeless shelter in the South Bronx.
And
let's kick him out of the White House.
Mina Hamilton is a writer
based in New York City. She can be
reached at minaham@aol.com
NOTES
(1)
Woodward, Bob, Bush at War, p. 38
(2)
Minutaglio, Bill, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family, p.34
(3)
Evins, Molly and Dubose, Lou, Shrub: The Short But Happy Life of George W.
Bush, p. 47
(4)
Ibid, page 36.
(6)
Miller, Mark Crispin, The Bush Dyslexion: Observations on a National
Disorder, p. 44.
(7)
www.washingtonpost.com, "1986:
A Life-Changing Year," July 25, 1999.
(8)
Miller, Op Cit., p.50
(9)
Ibid, p. 50
(10)Ibid,
p. 53
(11)
Ibid, p. 244
(12)
Merzer M., Hutchinson R., Brown D., "War begins in Iraq with strikes
at 'leadership targets,' "
Knight Ridder Newspapers, March 20, 2003.
(13)
Miller, Op Cit, p. 48
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