"Almost everybody knows that George W. is the son of the 41st President. But fewer know that the family has wielded power in corporate boardrooms and capital corridors for a century and a half. On his mom's side, he's related to Franklin Pierce, the 14th President (1853-57). His dad's paternal grandfather, Samuel P. Bush, was an Ohio steel executive and the first president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Samuel's son, Prescott, became a Connecticut senator. Prescott's wife, Dorothy, was the daughter of George Herbert Walker, a co-founder of Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest and largest private investment house on Wall Street. The Walker family helped finance the construction of Madison Square Garden and the Belmont Park racetrack--and later owned a big chunk of the New York Mets"

--Business Week, Nov 15, 1999

The previous quote embodies the public face of the Bush family, one of the richest and most influential American political dynasties in all our history. But it is almost shocking how little people actually know about the Bush family, particularly the history of the Bush men. I thought we might look beneath the veneer at the true face of America's political dynasty.

I am going to open with a story that is guaranteed to blow your hair back. This is a story that has been impossible to confirm in the mainstream press. Of course, this is part of the whole story, and why curiously the story keeps surfacing and disappearing all over the Internet. At the very least, this story is referred to enough to qualify as a modern legend. This is the extraordinary story of a dinner date that was scheduled to happen on March 31st 1981, the day of the strange assassination attempt on the life of former President Ronald Reagan. What should have been the biggest story of the 1980's seems to have been wiped clean from history, systematically prevented from ever again being mentioned by corporate media.

Held at the home of Neil Bush, the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, who himself was the very ambitious former CIA director and current Vice President, the guest of honor at the dinner party (which was quickly cancelled after news of the failed attempt on the life of the President), was Scott Hinckley, the brother of John Hinckley, the man who just that afternoon shot President Ronald Reagan, coming one half-inch from killing him.

A half-inch from putting George H.W. Bush, into the White House.

The Bush team's response to this chilling revelation on the planned dinner date was to barricade themselves behind a wall of the biggest PR Firms in the nation and issue the following statement "This horrible coincidence has been devastating to the Bush Family. Our condolences go out to all involved. And we hope to get the matter behind us as soon as possible." (sic)

As the story goes, the Bush Team decided to pawn it off as, of all things, "bad coincidence." In the days that followed, Washington whitewashed the story, backroom deals were struck, the spin doctors went into action, and an army of PR agents descended onto Washington to wipe clean from history this awful blemish, which might be "misinterpreted" should it ever get out.

Misinterpreted? Yes, because since 1970 both George Bush Sr. and John Hinckley Sr. were friends and fellow oil industrialists in Texas and Colorado, and Hinckley had given substantial sums of money to the failed 1980 Bush Presidential campaign. In 1978 Neil Bush lived in Lubbock, Texas while managing his brother George Jr's (our President) failed campaign for Congress. John Hinckley Jr. lived in Lubbock that year as well.

Coincidence? Apparently so. We are also supposed to believe that John Hinckley, Jr. was mentally disturbed, and, as the Bush story went, shot Reagan to please actress Jodie Foster, and his Uncle George had absolutely nothing to do with the entire incident, even indirectly and unwittingly.

Allegedly, the only mention of it to appear on national television was a brief comment by NBC's John Chancellor who was absolutely floored by the revelation and mentioned it during his newscast against the demands of NBC management. NBC quickly jumped in and censored it. The revelation was never mentioned again in any mainstream media outlet.

Having no chance to make it into the history books, the story resurfaced with the advent of the Internet. But something is happening here as well. The story is continually being expunged from the net, even as you read this. In 1999 one could find nearly a thousand independent articles pertaining to this story, then all of the sudden (strangely coinciding with the launch of the Bush 2000 Presidential campaign), one by one the pages and sites relating to the story started to disappear. Today there are but paltry few who are keeping the story alive. Since I first looked into this two years ago, three sources with virtually identical claims have vanished.

Is there a chill running down your spine yet? If there isn't, there should be. In a normally functioning society with a true free press, this many coincidences would sound a nuclear alert. Apparently, Congressman Larry MacDonald spoke out against it, but his plane crashed. But it wasn't just any plane it was the infamous Korean Air Lines 007, the flight that was shot down by Soviet fighters as it unexplainably veered into Soviet airspace. Many suspect it was an insider deal. Unless the Soviet MIG pilots were blind, it would have been awful hard to mistake a commercial jumbo jet airliner with a twenty-foot long corporate logo, broadcasting on a commercial frequency, for an American spy plane on a covert mission in broad daylight. Allegedly, this deal was for certain unfettered Soviet meddling in places like Afghanistan in the following years. Again, no way to prove it, but we should ask ourselves why political plane crashes have come to be known, euphemistically, as the "Wellstone Special"? If one were to count the number of fatal plane crashes that befell people connected to our four most recent Presidents, you start to toy with another unfathomable coincidence.

You may wonder how a real-life occurrence could be wiped clean from history, or how all these claims about the Bush family are never mentioned in the mainstream media. The answer was painfully simple. Through Executive Dominion over public records, Presidents and Governors can expunge any record they see fit. And as far as the government and the corporate media is concerned, if there is no public record of an event, it did not exist.

The claim against the Bush men, specifically GHW, GW, and Jeb, is that they carefully and systematically expunged records starting with the 2000 Presidential Election and dating back to the days of great-grandfather Samuel Prescott Bush, in effect making the Bushes public record look cleaner than the Brady Bunch. But no one gets to where these people have being honest and virtuous. These stories have been widely reported, but I would like to cite Michael Zezima's Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of the Good War (Soft Skull Press) and George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, as excellent sources of this forgotten history.

Being duly diligent, the only remaining question is motive? If the assumption-and it's a doozy-is that somehow then Vice President GHW Bush was involved in the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, we are forced to ask what would he have to gain, did he have the wherewithal, and why would he need to resort to assassination? Well, we know he had the money, power, and intelligence. We know that since he became President in 1988 the world has changed in a very dramatic fashion, mostly in a way that has benefited him (i.e. the "New World Order"). Yet we know he lost the 1980 Presidential primaries and the nomination to Reagan by overwhelming numbers, that Reagan was incredibly popular and had an appeal Bush would never have, and that Bush learned he was not very popular, particularly in the wake of former President Carter's housecleaning at the CIA which left 1000 of Bush's operatives out of work (it's ok, most of them now work for the Carlyle Group).

We have to acknowledge that by asking these questions, this story becomes immediately vaulted alongside the Kennedy Assassination into the pantheon of the "Great American Conspiracy Theory." But conspiracies can be revealed and "demystified" using simple history and common sense. Eventually you come to realize even the "conspiracy theory" itself is part of the public relations apparatus, meant to discredit those who poke too deeply as loonies and crackpots. The trick is having the right history. So, let's get up to speed on the First Family, and then see what conclusions we can draw.

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SAMUEL PRESCOTT BUSH (1863-1948)

The Grand Patriarch of the Bush clan founded the Buckeye Steel Castings Company in 1894 as The Buckeye Malleable Iron & Coupler Company. They manufactured steel car couplers for trains, truck bodies, bolsters, truck fenders, yokes, etc. Samuel, as did all the other Industrialists of the time, grew very wealthy and influential.

The U.S entered World War I in 1917. In the spring of 1918, Samuel P. Bush, became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board, taking national responsibility for government assistance to his own Remington Arms Company and other weapon makers. Through these weapons manufacturers, Samuel Bush made and sold arms to 75% of the WWI combatants on both sides.

Tarpley and Chaitkin say:

"With the war mobilization conducted under the supervision of the War Industries Board, U.S. consumers and taxpayers showered unprecedented fortunes on war producers and certain holders of raw materials and patents. Hearings in 1934 by the committee of U.S. Senator Gerald Nye attacked the "Merchants of Death", war profiteers such as Remington Arms and the British Vickers company, whose salesmen had manipulated many nations into wars, and then supplied all sides with the weapons to fight them. Most of the records and correspondence of Samuel Bush's arms- related section of the government have been burned, "to save space" in the National Archives. This matter of destroyed or misplaced records should be of concern to citizens of a constitutional republic. Unfortunately, it is a rather constant impediment with regard to researching George Bush's background: He is certainly the most "covert" American chief executive."

Samuel Bush was labeled a "Merchant of Death" in the years following the Great War as investigations began into the instigators of the war and of the new emerging world militarism. The German Army under the Kaiser was the largest and most well armed in the world in 1914, and they were largely armed by Samuel Bush. After WWI, Germany was stripped of their arms, but Samuel Bush was allowed to keep his millions, and his arms business was allowed to grow and prosper. In 1944 he was awarded a huge government contract to make armor casings for WWII. He died shortly after the war ended in 1948, within months of the passage of the National Security Act.

PRESCOTT BUSH

Prescott S. Bush was born on 15 May 1895 to Samuel Prescott Bush and Flora Sheldon Bush and was raised in Columbus, Ohio. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1917 and completed his Army career in 1919. Bush joined the firm of Brown Brothers and Company became a partner in 1930. In 1921 he married Dorothy Walker. The couple had five children, one of whom, George Herbert Walker Bush, would become the forty-first President of the United States. During his career, Prescott Bush served as a US Senator from Connecticut, and as director of several nationally known corporations, including the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the Wanadium Corporation of America, and Prudential Insurance.

Prescott also carried on the time honored Bush family tradition of German double-dealing by financing the Nazi industrialists on the NYSE. He was ordered by Congress to cease and desist on October 20, 1942. Under the "Trading With the Enemy Act" the US, seized the shares of the Union Banking Corporation (UBC). The UBC was established to send American money to Germany to finance the reorganization of its industry under the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a Director and shareholder. The largest shareholder was E. Roland Harriman of Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest and largest private investment house on Wall Street of which Prescott Bush was the managing partner. Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was a co-founder of Brown Brothers Harriman.

If you didn't already know, you should probably understand that during the 1930s, some very prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Joseph Kennedy were big fans of Hitler, and there was much concern in global power centers about rebuilding the highly efficient German industrial economy following WWI. Germany lay mired in catastrophic inflation, but the German "work ethic", as embodied by the hyperproductive Nazis, was very appealing to the American Industrial Titans. Michael Zezima says "One Third Reich supporter who never required a disclaimer was Henry Ford, the autocratic magnate who despised unions, tyrannized workers, and fired any employee caught driving a competitor's model. Ford, an outspoken anti-Semite, believed that Jews corrupted gentiles with 'syphilis, Hollywood, gambling, and jazz'. In 1918 he bought and ran a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, that became an anti-Jewish forum." Ford built plants in Cologne Germany that implemented Aryan-only hiring practices, and which miraculously survived Allied bombing raids. Ford also reportedly gave Hitler $30,000 as a present for Hitler's niece.

UBC's leading German partner was the notorious Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book admitting much of this called "I Paid Hitler." Among the companies financed was the Silesian-American Corporation, which was also managed by Prescott Bush. The company was vital in supplying coal to the Nazi war industry (you'll see the significance in a second). It too was seized as a Nazi-front on November 17, 1942. The largest company Bush's UBC helped finance was the German Steel Trust, responsible for between one-third and one-half of Nazi iron and explosives.

It gets worse. There is another buried story about a deal between William Stamps Farish, Prescott Bush, the Standard Oil Co (Rockefeller Family), and the I.G. Farben Company, a German chemical cartel that manufactured Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the Nazi death chambers. This deal, it is alleged, financed and built the Auschwitz Labor Camp, which opened on June 14, 1940 to produce artificial rubber and gasoline from coal. The Hitler government supplied political opponents and Jews as the "labor force". Apparently, after pleading "no contest" to charges of criminal conspiracy with the Nazis, William Stamps Farish was fined $5,000. Similar fines were levied against the Standard Oil Company. This of course did not interfere with the millions of dollars that Farish had acquired as Chairman, President, and major stockholder of the Standard Oil Company. Prescott Bush pocketed a hefty sum as well. And all the US government sought in exchange for spinning the story to focus exclusively on the Jewish Holocaust (which had a whole host of benefits) was the use of certain petroleum patents that this company had given to the Nazis, the so-called "Auschwitz patents".

GEORGE HERBER WALKER BUSH

George Herbert Walker Bush has lived a life straddling the three most powerful entities on the planet, the Banking, Petrochemical, and Arms/Intelligence industries. His family branched out from banking to the oil business during the Texas boom, and GHW Bush decided to parlay his considerable wealth and influence into a series of political jobs en route to the eventual Presidency.

He served two terms as a Representative to Congress from Texas. Twice he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate. Then he was appointed to a series of high-level positions: Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Chief of the U. S. Liaison Office in the People's Republic of China, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was as head of the CIA during the Cold War that he is rumored to have done his most heinous acts, and why most of these acts have been downplayed or disregarded. It seems that the American government has no culpability and can do no wrong so long as they are fighting Fascists, Communists, or Terrorists. The public has accepted this and, worse, come to encourage it under these false pretenses. More on that later, but for now, we can only begin to imagine what GHW Bush did and excused away in the name of "National Security".

We assume Poppy Bush expunged his own CIA narcotrafficking operations with Panamanian Dictator Manuel Noriega [2][3][4], dealings in the Iran-Contra scandal, his extended and close relationship with the Saudi Royals and the Bin-Laden family, which led to his arming the Mujahadeen against the Soviets. We don't know the truth about his complicity with son Neil in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, and his own arms deals through the Carlyle Group, what Poppy Bush does now in his "retirement". Shadowy "Public Relations" heavyweights like the Carlyle Group, Bechtel Group, and Wackenhut invest in eventualities that lead to the use of force to control populations. All are government security contractors with deep ties to both the military and the intelligence community. Wackenhut's specialty is incarceration, and they run America's prison systems. They also have their own very lethal private army - the same goes for the Bechtel Group, run by former US Secretary of State George Shultz.

The Carlyle Group [2] [3 - most recent] is basically a collection of the heaviest of heavyweight political insiders who buy failing military contractors at bargain basement prices. The reason why they buy the failing discounted companies is because the Defense Department appropriations guidelines requires that companies be in existence for a certain time before being allowed to enter government contracts. Then, with all the requirements and appearances in place (very much like a mob "front") they are free to do insider deals with their buddies in government. That's the Carlyle Group in a nutshell.

Who's on the board of the Carlyle Group? George Bush Sr., Bush's former Secretary of State James Baker, Former Conservative British Prime Minister John Major, and Frank Carlucci, former Defense Secretary and Princeton University wrestling teammate of current Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The most widely reported case of the Carlyle group's malfeasance was the Crusader Tank debacle, a lemon of a tank that Carlyle tried to ram down the throats of the military to the tune of some $14 billion dollars. The politicos fought hard for this useless tank and only sacrificed the program when it became clear that had they continued pushing for a useless weapons system, it would have become the poster child of defense appropriations corruption and a lightning rod for critics. Remember the $400 hammer and the $10,000 toilet seat? Same people.

The Carlyle Group and those like them, privately held corporations, have a disproportionate level of influence in American government affairs, and are in fact not aiding but undermining the security of the United States of America by perpetuating a militaristic world culture in order to continue to expand their fortunes and spheres of influence. As mentioned before, it took acts of Congress to get Samuel Bush and Prescott Bush to halt their undermining of American security for profit. Does it look like the George's are up to granddad's old tricks? If they aren't, again, this is surely another amazing coincidence.

GW. BUSH

The dossier on the current Bush president looks even worse. Taken as a whole, about the only thing of significance GW Bush did before being selected for the Presidency was to cover up his many stupendous screw-ups. He ran for Congress and lost. He produced a Hollywood B movie that flopped. He bought an oil company, but couldn't find any oil in Texas, and the company, Harken Energy, financed in part by the Bin Laden family, went bankrupt shortly after he sold off all his stock. He bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a deal that took land using taxpayer money, but failed to turn much of a profit or bring the team to success. His biggest move was to trade Sammy Sosa to the Chicago White Sox (the Sox are responsible for trading a pre-steroid Sosa to the Cubs). With his father's help (and his name) he was elected Governor of Texas.

As Governor of Texas he changed pollution laws to benefit energy companies and made Texas the most polluted state in the Nation, and Houston replaced Los Angeles as the most smog-ridden city in America. He cut taxes and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money. He set the record for most executions by any Governor in American history.

To reach the Presidency, Bush set the record for most campaign fundraising trips than any other president in US history, the record for most corporate campaign donations (2000), and is currently on the road raising a record-breaking $200 Million dollars for his 2004 Presidential re-election campaign having just signed new legislation that prevents his Democratic counterparts from ever raising that level of funding. GW Bush became President after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes with the help of his father's appointments to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. His accomplishments, if they can be called that, are numerous. Here are just the basics.

After being selected by the Supreme Court in an election debacle that polarized the nation like no way since the Civil War, during his first year in office he set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history, golfing away the entire month of August 2001 before returning to preside over the worst security failure in US history the following September. As President, GW Bush invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, spent the $7 trillion budget surplus and emptied the treasury en route to upping the Defense budget to a composite $700 Billion dollars a year and shattering the record for biggest annual deficit in American history at $400 Billion and rising, all while handing back nearly three quarters of a trillion dollars to the richest 10% of the country. Continuing his Texas tradition, Bush was the first president in decades to execute a federal prisoner while being the first president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.

In response to the 9/11 attacks, he signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any president in US history, created the largest Government bureaucracy since Roosevelt while slowly dismantling Roosevelt's contributions, and had a prepared draft of the Patriot Act ready to sign into law, giving the Executive Office the ability to wage war, appropriate funds, and control social freedoms in a an emperor-like manner.

In his first two years in office over 2.5 million Americans lost their jobs, and in response he cut social services and unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any president in US history. Under his Administration the nation set the economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12-month period, and watched the biggest volume and percentage drop in the history of the stock market.

He presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed. The most blatant corruption came from his good friend, campaign contributor and fellow Houstonian Kenneth Lay, Chairman of Enron. Bush presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history while refusing to use the national reserves. His energy policies call for new drilling in a National Wildlife Sanctuary in Alaska, refusal of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, and the co-opting of the Iraqi, Caspian Basin, and Indonesian oil and gas reserves. To accomplish much of this, he dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history, claiming they were all of a bygone era, while refusing new 21st Century international treaties like the International Criminal Court in an attempt to shield many Americans from war crimes charges. His Administration has also made it clear they view the United Nations as an "obsolete" entity, particularly after the UN unilaterally opposed the American invasion of Iraq, and removed the US from the High Commission on Human Rights and the Elections Monitoring Board, while Bush refused United Nations election inspectors during the 2002 US elections.

Lastly, he filled his cabinet, the richest of any administration in US history, with Energy and Defense Executives who have substantially profited from the above mentioned wars and energy crises, while the rest of the nation is beset with the above listed miseries.

Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President tried to tell the story of this spoiled, drug-addled sociopath with electric charm and enough muscle behind him to occupy Washington. During 2000, the original publisher St. Martin's Press received threats from Bush campaign lawyers, and sat by as author Jim Hatfield was destroyed in public. St, Martin's withdrew their edition of 70,000 from stores with promises to burn them. Soft Skull Press republished the book, but ran into corporate media intent on attacking the author. A Texas lawsuit shut down distribution of the book, Hatfield's life became the bigger story, and the message he was trying to send seemed destined to remain unheard. Under the relentless assault of a public smear campaign of epic proportions, Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.

The book talks about two major incidents in the formative years of the President, his 1973-1974 18-month AWOL stint from the Texas Air National Guard where he was serving to avoid Vietnam, and his much reported but nearly impossible to confirm 1972 drunk driving and cocaine arrest with his younger brother Marvin. Mostly, Fortunate Son is a portrait of an extremely fortunate heir who was so ill suited to business and responsibility that he would have been better suited leaving his affairs to a squadron of rhesus monkeys.

But you don't need a book to chronicle this current President's transgressions, they are occurring right in front of our eyes. The more he pushes Wilsonian rollbacks, Empire, and the abrogation of civil rights, the more people willingly seem eager to cede their long fought rights away under the outmoded and overplayed rubrics of "patriotism" and "national security". Besides their rights, Americans have also ceded nearly all their savings. Only the wealthiest have money, the rest of America is flat broke or worse, deep in debt. Yet we are told that polls say more than half the American people approve of Bush? But in our daily life nearly everyone around us seems to despise (and certainly distrust) this Bush President. Why is that?

THE MILITARY MEDIA MACHINE

Americans are already widely regarded by social critics to be the most lied to population on earth, and the lies are the most effective because they prey upon our deepest loves and fears in the form of security and patriotism (have you ever wondered why Flags, Moms, and Apple Pies are tied together when your nation should have little to do with your love of family and childhood innocence). However, this is not an unbreakable illusion.

When one thing seems apparent, but challenges conventional wisdom, its fancy name is cognitive dissonance, or the disconnect between what you perceive or believe, and what is reality. There is huge cognitive dissonance between these claims about the Bush family, and the public face of the Bush family. But as you have seen, these stories are not made up, and so, we are forced to consider and eventually choose between these two realities. This is the real Matrix: swallow the right pill and the truth will reveal itself. The red pill (blood) shows you that we have been living an illusion of benevolence and self-importance when in fact we are nothing more than "batteries" (consumers) for the machines that have taken over the planet (the military-industrial complex). To fight against the machines directly is impossible; we can only hide from them. To win, you must enter the Matrix and beat them at their own game inside their own creation, plant a virus that will kill the machine and erode it from within.

What you have to do first and foremost is discard the conventional wisdom. It was very hard to do this with the media until this year, but then miraculously the curtain flipped open for a second and we saw the true face of the mainstream corporate media, which was more about entertainment and money than news and information, and would rather make up news than report actual news. Let's just face it and be honest with each other, the news is not news at all but carefully constructed distraction. It's just that simple. Ditto for the major public opinion polls. Nothing is left too chance.

Here's why. Since the 1950's with the inception of "Operation Mockingbird" [2][3] the CIA's plan was to infiltrate all the major media organizations in an attempt to control public opinion and indoctrinate an entire Boomer generation into war and militarism. We were definitely not the first society on earth to do this, but we were the first to do so in such an overwhelmingly effective medium like television, and apparently they succeeded. Former Director of the CIA William Colby was quoted as saying, "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." And George Herbert Walker Bush ran the CIA for a decade. (post script: Colby died in a "boating accident" during the Noriega investigations).

Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite revealed the tip of the iceberg by admitting that he had "sometimes" relayed as news stories directly handed to him by the CIA. His successor Dan Rather has long been rumored to carry on in this tradition. This all makes perfect sense when you consider Prescott Bush ran CBS, and his son, GHW Bush, ran the CIA. Considering the depth and level of media deception that infiltrates American life there is nothing at all implausible in suggesting that even the Nielson ratings themselves are rigged. Paddy Chaefsky wrote all about this in the hit 1979 film Network. The point is that there is more than ample evidence that the Post-Watergate Defense industry, Media, and Intelligence communities are all intertwined, spinning the same seamless reality day after day, and co-opting any force or voice of dissent.

Terror works. History reveals that Western Civilization will let their leaders do pretty much anything they want so long as they don't get caught in a sex scandal or slaughter their own people on their own soil. We don't support Bush. Very few actually do. But this fact will never be reported in the mainstream media. Layers of misleading polls will conceal this fact, press releases with leaning inflection and bias that show our "overwhelming" support for "the President" (not the same thing). And even in the unlikely event that the resistance becomes so obvious that even fraudulent polls can no longer conceal the reality (can you hear the rumblings?), Bush will seem to move with impunity, ignoring the polls, ignoring opposition, labeling the opposition as "unpatriotic". He has proven that he has nothing but contempt for public opinion. "I don't govern by focus group" I think was how he put it when asked about he felt about popular opinion.

Public opinion polls the day before the September 11th attacks all said that Bush was in serious political trouble. I have a copy of Newsweek dated that week. The two lead stories: "Condit: What did he know?" and "Where Has The Budget Surplus Gone?" Already the questions were beginning. His popularity was at an all time low, and this coming from polling organizations largely influenced and associated with the Bush organization. His only support was coming from the Christian Right for his "faith-based initiatives" program. But when those planes slammed into the towers, the Bush team knew that they had a winner. They could shape the public's opinion's into anything they wanted, just like after the Reichstag Fire.

THE IMMINENT THREAT TO NATIONAL SECURITY

"Mass control through self terrorism" was invented by the Romans and perfected by the Nazis, or so we are led to believe. This technique of attacking one's own population then stepping up to be the, "protector" ala Crassus or Hitler has proven to be the most reliable method of control for the problems of domestic populations. America used this technique in 1898 to declare war on Spain and launch an Empire to eventually control the Pacific markets. Strong evidence suggests we sank our own battleship, the Maine, and blamed it on the Spanish. "Remember the Maine was sufficient enough to rally the American population to support what was later understood to be a land grab of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. During WWI Wilson used the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania as cause to enter the war, but failed to tell the US population that the military was using commercial liners to ship arms to the allies. Pearl Harbor? Evidence surfaced proving Roosevelt knew of the attack. Later we would do the same thing in Vietnam in what was known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Incident." The military set up it's own ship to get bombed by the Vietnamese so we could invade

And recently, documents were unearthed showing that in 1961 the Joint Chiefs of Staff devised detailed plans to kill Americans and blame it on Cuba as a pretext for invasion. By the time these plans reached Kennedy's desk, Kennedy killed them straightaway. See the actual document for yourself [Operation Northwoods].

So what about the first Gulf War? Evidence clasims that George H.W. Bush relayed information to Saddam Hussein in July of 1990 through US Ambassador April Glaspie that the US ".has no opinion on your border dispute with Kuwait." and would not intervene if he invaded Kuwait. Behind these words was a desire to goad Iraq into a war for three principle aims:

1. To destroy the massive army it had helped Iraq build to battle the Iranians during the 1980s
2. To get US military bases in Saudi Arabia.
3. To have a swift, overwhelming US victory with few US casualties broadcast around the world in order to herald the New World Order led by America.

All three succeeded amply.

And lastly, we must ask about 9/11. Ample evidence suggests the Bush Administration knew of a massive coming attack, but that really should be secondary to the obvious knowledge that it is this very militaristic, imperial arms & oil foreign policy that created Al Qaeda and dozens of other groups like them. Osama Bin Laden is the mother of all disgruntled ex-employees, a former CIA operative turned Islamic warrior who felt betrayed by the US and now uses our War on Terror to recruit new members into his army. In this regard, both Bush and Bin Laden provide for and ensure each other's continued existence. So long as Osama and Saddam are still out there, Bush won't be out of a job. Therefore, it is not in his best interest to find either. To rid the world of Bin Laden, we need first to rid the world of Bush and replace him with someone to whom Osama Bin Laden is not a conflict of interest.

As a final kicker to 9/11, check out the much hyped mystery stock deals in airlines, defense, etc, discovered in the immediate days following the 9/11 attacks? A German investigative team linked the questionable stock purchase to the brokerage house of.you guessed it.Brown Brothers Harriman and Co., and the number 2 man at the CIA, Buzz Krongard. The story took the most precipitous dive into oblivion, just like that Hinckley-Bush story.

Nearly two years after the attack, the American people are facing record unemployment, the looting of the treasury is complete, the social security trust fund is emptied, and in it's place is a $400 Billion dollar budget deficit, equal to half of our total annual military spending, most of which goes into the pockets of the Carlyle Group, the Bechtel Group, Wackenhut, Halliburton, Dick Cheney's company, and Lockheed-Martin, Lynne Cheney's company. This unabated spending is threatening to deflate our economy for the first time since the Great Depression. Meanwhile the Federal government is telling it's people, who pony up roughly $5000 a piece each year for their wars, that they have no money for health care, education, transportation, environmental concerns, social services, or retirement security. Add to that mix our two new colonies in the Middle East that are draining American money like two giant over-chlorinated swimming pools in the middle of Hell.

****************

The Bush Family leads one of the most frightening conglomerates of oil, arms, and political insiders in history. They seem to have one modus operandi: Play both sides, and eliminate the loser. The pattern of wars, arms, drugs, assassinations, and covert deals somehow connected to generation after generation of Bushes is astonishing. And there is more missing information about the Bush Presidencies than any other President ever, and too many suspicious unexplained questions about all four generations of Bushes to think that's its all some Liberal conspiracy. Even if half of these events did happen in some form or other, it is clear indication these people are not who they claim to be, and their contempt for the American people may be unparalleled.

We would be well served to remember the second Presidential term is always where American Presidents seem to do the most damage and move with the most impunity. Nixon had Watergate and Cambodia, Reagan had Iran-Contra, and Clinton had Kosovo. Short of a reelection (if, as Gore Vidal posits, we are even permitted an election in '04), a four-year wholesale looting of the Treasury through insider arms dealing will be complete, and many imply the Bushies will be just as satisfied, just like they were in 1992 when they were ousted from office the last time.

We'll I'm with Pat Buchanan on this one. To Hell with the Military Empire! New Roma wishes to remain a decadent Republic, please. Let's recall the troops, break out the wine, and head for the Vomitorium. And while we're at it, on our way over, let's make a stop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, grab this new Crassus, and hand him over to the masses.

Say, that reminds me, can someone remember to check in on me here and there?

Related Reading:

Fortunate Son (2000 - Soft Skull Press) Written by Jim Hatfield

Fortunate Son and the controversy surrounding its publication are also the subject of the new documentary film Horns and Halos by directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley. Horns and Halos has been selected as "Best Documentary" of 2002 at both the New York Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and is an Official Selection at the 2002 Toronto and Rotterdam International Film Festivals.