Tom Englehardt, who writes the TomDispatch blog, has written a superb retrospective and assessment of the Bush administration. Englehardt doesn't mince words!
His piece "Foreclosed:The George W. Bush Story" has been reproduced on The Nation:
"They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen--if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, the Brooklyn Bridge, three-card monte, bizarre visions of Iraqi unmaanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the United States, Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste or simply eternal global dominance.
When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting central theaters of their "Global War on Terror" but on the theater that mattered most to them--the "home front," where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Indeed."
His piece "Foreclosed:The George W. Bush Story" has been reproduced on The Nation:
"They may have been the most disastrous dreamers, the most reckless gamblers and the most vigorous imperial hucksters and grifters in our history. Selling was their passion. And they were classic American salesmen--if you're talking about underwater land in Florida, the Brooklyn Bridge, three-card monte, bizarre visions of Iraqi unmaanned aerial vehicles armed with chemical and biological weaponry let loose over the United States, Saddam Hussein's mushroom clouds rising over American cities, a full-scale reordering of the Middle East to our taste or simply eternal global dominance.
When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the "commander-in-chief" of a "wartime" country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting central theaters of their "Global War on Terror" but on the theater that mattered most to them--the "home front," where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods. Of his timing in ramping up a campaign to invade Iraq in September 2002, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card infamously explained: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
Indeed."
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