On the Relative Vileness of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Liz Cheney and Marjorie Taylor Greene [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

FEBRUARY 10, 2021

BY GARY LEUPP

When I think Donald Trump I think the word: VILE. A combination of the evil and repulsive. But when I think George W. Bush I ALSO think “vile.”

There is no great moral distance between Bush as Texas governor mocking the plea for mercy by a death row female prisoner who’d become a born-again Christian in 1998, and Trump as candidate mocking a handicapped reporter for criticizing him in 2016.

Or between Bush as president ordering, in a threatening tone, his international terrorism advisor Richard Clarke in 2001 to “look into Iraq, Saddam” in connection with 9-11 and Trump’s order to the Georgia secretary of state to find the missing votes he needs to win the election. Both former presidents are ignorant, callous, amoral, misanthropic monsters. Human scum, in the pithy Korean expression.

Bush and his powerful co-president Dick Cheney, like Trump, lied incessantly from 2001 to achieve their designs, in particular their plan to reconfigure the entire Middle East under U.S. hegemony. That effort meant whipping up fears of a nuclear attack from Baghdad, the destruction of Iraq as a modern state, and the deaths of over half a million innocent people. Bush’s aide and “brain,” Karl Rove—a master of disinformation and dirty tricks—boasted to Ron Suskind that truth didn’t matter anymore, because “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/10/on-the-relative-vileness-of-george-w-bush-and-donald-trump-liz-cheney-and-marjorie-taylor-greene/