Feingold's censure resolution has rallied the support of a number of liberal groups, but it has also galvanized conservatives in support of the embattled war-time president.

Republicans have dismissed the resolution as a political stunt, while many Democrats have distanced themselves from it as they jockey for position for the November congressional elections.

So far, just two of Feingold's 43 fellow Senate Democrats, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California, have co-sponsored his resolution.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The previously undisclosed review by Hadley was part of a damage-control effort launched after former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV alleged that Bush's claims regarding the uranium were not true. The CIA had sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger in 2002 to investigate the purported procurement efforts by Iraq; he reported that they were most likely a hoax.

The White House was largely successful in defusing the Niger controversy because there was no evidence that Bush was aware that his claims about the uranium were based on faulty intelligence. Then-CIA Director George Tenet swiftly and publicly took the blame for the entire episode, saying that he and the CIA were at fault for not warning Bush and his aides that the information might be untrue.

But Hadley and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.

For one, Hadley's review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.

For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon -- even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.

And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration's conduct in the months leading up to war.

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

The President's Summary

Most troublesome to those leading the damage-control effort was documentary evidence -- albeit in highly classified government records that they might be able to keep secret -- that the president had been advised that many in the intelligence community believed that the tubes were meant for conventional weapons.

The one-page documents known as the "President's Summary" are distilled from the much lengthier National Intelligence Estimates, which combine the analysis of as many as six intelligence agencies regarding major national security issues. Bush's knowledge of the State and Energy departments' dissent over the tubes was disclosed in a March 4, 2006, National Journal story -- more than three years after the intelligence assessment was provided to the president, and some 16 months after the 2004 presidential election.

The President's Summary was only one of several high-level warnings given to Bush and other senior administration officials that serious doubts existed about the intended use of the tubes, according to government records and interviews with former and current officials.

In mid-September 2002, two weeks before Bush received the October 2002 President's Summary, Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren't certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.

Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.

When U.S. inspectors entered Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, they determined that Iraq's nuclear program had been dormant for more than a decade and that the aluminum tubes had been used only for conventional weapons.

In the end, the White House's damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president's knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush's re-election.

Choreography

The new disclosures regarding the tubes may also shed light on why officials so vigorously attempted to discredit Wilson's allegations regarding Niger, including by leaking information to the media that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Administration officials hoped that the suggestion that Plame had played a role in the agency's choice of Wilson for the Niger trip might cast doubt on his allegations.

I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of staff and national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on October 28 on five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice in attempting to conceal his role in outing Plame as an undercover CIA operative. Signaling a possible defense strategy, Libby's attorneys filed papers in federal court on March 17 asserting that he had not intentionally deceived FBI agents and a federal grand jury while answering questions about Plame because her role was only "peripheral" to potentially more serious questions regarding the Bush administration's use of intelligence in the prewar debate. "The media conflagration ignited by the failure to find [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq and in part by Mr. Wilson's criticism of the administration, led officials within the White House, the State Department, and the CIA to blame each other, publicly and in private, for faulty prewar intelligence about Iraq's WMD capabilities," Libby's attorneys said in court papers.

Plame's identity was disclosed during "a period of increasing bureaucratic infighting, when certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability," the attorneys said. "The White House and the CIA were widely regarded to be at war."

Only two months before Wilson went public with his allegations, the Iraq war was being viewed as one of the greatest achievements of Bush's presidency. Rove, whom Bush would later call the "architect" of his re-election campaign, was determined to exploit the war for the president's electoral success. On May 1, 2003, Bush made a dramatic landing on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce to the nation the cessation of major combat operations in Iraq. Dressed in a military flight suit, the president emerged from a four-seat Navy S-3B Viking with the words "George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief" painted just below the cockpit window.

The New York Times later reported that White House aides "had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the 'Mission Accomplished' banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot."

On May 6, in a column in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof quoted an unnamed former ambassador as saying that allegations that Saddam had attempted to procure uranium from Africa were "unequivocally wrong" and that "documents had been forged." But the column drew little notice.

A month later, on June 5, the president made a triumphant visit to Camp As Sayliyah, the regional headquarters of Central Command just outside Qatar's capital, where he spoke to 1,000 troops who were in camouflage fatigues. Afterward, Rove took out a camera and began snapping pictures of service personnel with various presidential advisers. "Step right up! Get your photo with Ari Fleischer -- get 'em while they're hot. Get your Condi Rice," Rove said, according to press accounts of the trip. On the trip home, as Air Force One flew at 31,000 feet over Iraqi airspace, escorted by pairs of F-18 fighters off each wing, the plane's pilots dipped the wings as a sign, an administration spokesperson explained, "that Iraq is now free."

There were few hints of what lay ahead: that sectarian violence would engulf Iraq to the point where some fear civil war and that more than 2,440 American troops and contractors would lose their lives in Iraq and an additional 17,260 servicemen and -women would be wounded.

Blame The CIA

The pre-election damage-control effort in response to Wilson's allegations and the broader issue of whether the Bush administration might have misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials: blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address; discredit and undermine Wilson; and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.

On July 8, 2003, two days after Wilson challenged the Niger-uranium claim in an op-ed article in The New York Times, Libby met with Judith Miller, then a Times reporter, for breakfast at the St. Regis hotel in Washington. Libby told Miller that Wilson's wife, Plame, worked for the CIA, and he suggested that Wilson could not be trusted because his wife may have played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. Also during that meeting, according to accounts given by both Miller and Libby, Libby provided the reporter with details of a then-classified National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE contained detailed information that Iraq had been attempting to procure uranium from Niger and perhaps two other African nations. Libby and other administration officials believed that the NIE showed that Bush's statements reflected the consensus view of the intelligence community at the time.

According to Miller's account of that meeting in The Times, Libby told her that "the assessments of the classified estimate" that Iraq had attempted to get uranium from Africa and was attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program "were even stronger" than a declassified White Paper on Iraq that the administration had made public to make the case for war.

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has said that he considers the selective disclosure of elements of the NIE to be "inextricably intertwined" with the outing of Plame. Papers filed in federal court by Libby's attorneys on March 17 stated that Libby "believed his actions were authorized" and that he had "testified before the grand jury that this disclosure was authorized," a reference to the NIE details he gave to Miller.

In the same filings, Libby's attorneys said that Hadley played a key role in attempting to have the NIE declassified and made available to reporters: "Mr. Hadley was active in discussions about the need to declassify and disseminate the NIE and [also] had numerous conversations during [this] critical early-July period with Mr. Tenet about the 16 words [the Niger claim in the State of the Union address] and Mr. Tenet's public statements about that issue."

Three days later, on July 11, while on a visit to Africa, Bush and his top aides intensified their efforts to counter the damage done by Wilson's Niger allegations.

Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he -- unlike others in the Bush administration -- had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe that Iraq's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.

Responding, Rice said: "I'm saying that when we put [Powell's speech] together ... the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did.... The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view." Rice added, "Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me."

In fact, contrary to Rice's statement, the president was indeed informed of such doubts when he received the October 2002 President's Summary of the NIE. Both Cheney and Rice also got copies of the summary, as well as a number of other intelligence reports about the State and Energy departments' doubts that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program.

Discrediting Wilson

After Air Force One landed in Entebbe, the president placed the blame squarely on the CIA for the Niger information in the State of the Union: "I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services." Within hours, Tenet accepted full responsibility. The intelligence information on Niger, Tenet said in a prepared statement, "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed." Tenet went on to say, "I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. The president had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

Behind the scenes, the White House and Tenet had coordinated their statements for maximum effect. Hadley, Libby, and Rove had reviewed drafts of Tenet's statement days in advance. And Hadley and Rove even suggested changes in the draft, according to government records and interviews.

Meanwhile, as the president, Rice, and White House advisers worked to contain the damage from overseas, Rove and Libby, who had remained in Washington, moved forward with their effort to discredit Wilson. That same day, July 11, the two spoke privately at the close of a White House senior staff meeting.

According to grand jury testimony from both men, Rove told Libby that he had spoken to columnist Robert Novak on July 9 and that Novak had said he would soon be writing a column about Valerie Plame. On July 12, the day after Rice's briefing, the president's and Tenet's comments, and the conversation between Rove and Libby regarding Novak, the issue of discrediting Wilson through his wife was still high on the agenda. According to the indictment of Libby: "Libby flew with the vice president and others to and from Norfolk, Virginia on Air Force Two." On the return trip, "Libby discussed with other officials aboard the plane what Libby should say in response to certain pending media inquiries" regarding Wilson's allegations.

Later that day, Libby spoke on the phone with Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Cooper had been told days earlier that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA. During this conversation, according to Libby's indictment, "Libby confirmed to Cooper, without elaboration or qualification, that he had heard this information, too." Also that day, Libby's indictment charged, "Libby spoke by telephone with Judith Miller ... and discussed Wilson's wife, and that she worked at the CIA."

On July 14, Novak published his now-famous column identifying Plame as a CIA "operative" and reporting that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger.

On July 18, the Bush administration declassified a relatively small portion of the NIE and held a press briefing to discuss it, in a further effort to show that the president had used the Niger information only because the intelligence community had vouched for it. Reporters noted that an "alternate view" box in the NIE stated that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as INR) believed that claims of Iraqi purchases of uranium from Africa were "highly dubious" and that State and DOE also believed that the aluminum tubes were "most likely for the production of artillery shells."

But White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett suggested that both the president and Rice had been unaware of this information: "They did not read footnotes in a 90-page document." Later, addressing the same issue, Bartlett said, "The president of the United States is not a fact-checker."

Because the Bush administration was able to control what information would remain classified, however, reporters did not know that Bush had received the President's Summary that informed him that both State's INR and the Energy Department doubted that the aluminum tubes were to be used for a nuclear-related purpose.

(Ironically, at one point, before he had reviewed the one-page summary, Hadley considered declassifying it because it said nothing about the Niger intelligence information being untrue. However, after reviewing the summary and realizing that it would have disclosed presidential knowledge that INR and DOE had doubts about the tubes, senior Bush administration officials became preoccupied with ensuring that the text of the document remained classified, according to an account provided by an administration official.)

On July 22, the White House arranged yet another briefing for reporters regarding the Niger controversy. Hadley, when asked whether there was any reason that the president should have hesitated in citing Iraq's procurement of aluminum tubes as evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions, answered, "It is an assessment in which the director and the CIA stand by to this day. And, therefore, we have every reason to be confident."

Later that summer, the Senate Intelligence Committee launched an investigation of intelligence agencies to determine why they failed to accurately assess that Saddam had no viable programs to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion.

As National Journal first disclosed on its Web site on October 27, 2005, Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Saddam's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Among those documents was the President's Summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

In July 2004, when the Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on its investigation of prewar intelligence by the CIA and other agencies, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in his own "Additional Views" to the report, "Concurrent with the production of a National Intelligence Estimate is the production of a one-page President's Summary of the NIE. A one-page President's Summary was completed and disseminated for the October 2002 NIE ... though there is no mention of this fact in [this] report. These one-page NIE summaries are ... written exclusively for the president and senior policy makers and are therefore tailored for that audience."

Durbin concluded, "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the NIE dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- qualifiers and all -- there is nothing clearer than this single page."

The ruthless financial aristocracy recruits neurotic and paranoid wannabes from within the ranks of reactionary politicians, fundamental preachers, radical print journalists and hate radio babblers, in order to propagandize the naïve voters of America. I feel very strongly that our American democracy and the late great middle class that made our land so successful, are deliberately being sold down the river into the snake, spider and scorpion infested cane fields. I very clearly perceive that we patriotic citizens who fought America's wars, worked hard all our lives, worshipped devoutly and played by the rules, are being crucified because we and our families believe we deserve to share in the American dream. Of course, we must realize that the disastrous results of globalization are not an inevitable outcome of capitalism -- but a deliberate scheme by the financial aristocracy to sweep all of the world's wealth into their own coffers. We must understand that no economist can honestly deny the reality of this scam with his drivel about the economy doing so well on Wall Street. So it does, for the benefit of the elite -- because global finance was designed to give them the wealth, even as middle class America is swiftly losing the purchasing power needed to keep our economy strong into the future.

As I see it, after I have spent lifetime of psycho-spiritual researching, teaching, preaching and counseling, the aristocratic globalization scam is being used to divide the American nation into a handful of extremely powerful families and their more numerous panderers -- while forcing worker bee Americans into poorly paid serfdom so the elite users and abusers can seize virtually all the power, possessions, pleasure and prestige. There are many reasons why men and women will sacrifice their humanity to gain great wealth but the unconscious factor that flogs them on and on is almost always a wounded ego. No emotionally or spiritually healthy parent will sacrifice two or three families to divorce, addiction and neuroticism in order to become wealthy and so powerful that one can never again be devalued or challenged. This is the stuff of mental illness and it is a form of overcompensation from infancy and childhood when one was forced to feel inept and useless, to internalize free floating anxiety that continues to drive the wounded person relentlessly. When neurotic sufferers become enormously wealthy and powerful, they virtually always start portray themselves as important personages who have attained god-like significance. People who need thousand dollar shower curtains, a hundred two thousand dollar suits or gowns and two hundred pairs of hand made shoes, in order to feel good about life and their place in it, are desperately trying to sooth a crippled ego. Alas, most of them fail, for there isn't enough power, prestige or possessions in the world to plug the bottomless hole in the egos of such men and women. As I wrote about neurotic persons in my book The Liberated Soul, most strongly acquisitive men and women who are fiercely driven to appear important and find lasting security, are consumed by terrible anxieties about their own mortality. They are trying desperately to gain such power and prestige that even death itself will yield to their determination to be spectacularly significant and God-like. Even men like Andrew Carniege and John D. Rockefeller were forced at last to make amends for their greed by giving much of their wealth away when they realized the could neither spend it all nor take it with them to the grave. And I cannot think of any current public figure who reveals his ego wounds more clearly than George W. Bush.

I believe all loyal Americans should enthusiastically welcome the current return to sanity reflected in the declining presidential and congressional polls. We have long needed to come to our senses during the vicious political, spiritual and financial war now being waged against the middle class by the ruthless cabal of proto-fascist Republicans of whom George W. Bush is merely the front man and most visible member. It is long past time we voters realized that the emperor and his yapping hate mongers are wearing no clothes. For a generation now, the greedy abusers called neo-conservatives have waged a war to dominate the world's economy. They have fostered the great financial scam called globalization in which the half century long Cold War, the Indochina and Iraqi wars and even the compromise of democracy and the looming destruction of the Republic, are but skirmishes. The ultimate scam of wicked reactionary politicians, fundamental preachers and authoritarian plutocrats is to deliver more and more wealth and power to the new breed of global robber barons for whom America means nothing more than a major market. Any country will suit them just fine if it offers more wealth. Of course, the term neo-conservative is no longer adequate to describe this narcissistic triad of manipulators currently dominating our nation for its own benefit. The truth of the matter is far more complex.

The financial aristocracy is currently being served very well through the egoistic ambitions of the Bush family, with clever handlers such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and until recently Card, who are used and well paid but never admitted into the elite inner circle. The Bush family also uses congressional bullies like Tom DeLay, Rick Santorim and many others. Some religious leaders in the cabal yearn for a theocracy which they control rather than a democracy in which the people are free to worship and vote as they please. This element of the triad includes James Dobson, Pat Robertson and most of the Southern Baptist and Roman Catholic hierarchy. I believe the very strange political bedfellows that come from fundamental backwoods churches and very expensive Dallas and Houston country clubs, must be seen as proto-fascistic neurotics.

We never have had any guarantees that the Republic would survive the greed of our ruthless home grown abusers. When a Philadelphia woman asked Ben Franklin what he and the other founders had accomplished, he quipped -- We have given you a republic, Madam -- if you can keep it. Old Ben was no fool -- he knew that there are always egoistic abusers driven by psychological and spiritual wounds to seek the illusion of personal significance by amassing great wealth and power. Some persons think about nothing but wealth and power and how to acquire them for thirty or forty years. They go through spouses and families like they were swapping used cars. Lord Charles Babbington of McCaulay, wrote perceptively in his superb history of the British Empire. (I paraphrase) Every noble family, royal kingdom, profitable company and vast civilization eventually destroys itself by creating so many vested interest groups that it cannot adapt in time to survive when it must surrender something important or perish. Franklin who lived in England about the time Lord McCaulay was writing, understood that of the twenty-two civilizations which left their footprints on Earth, all but two collapsed because of their narcissistic internal contradictions. That isn't to say there wasn't some younger, more flexible society waiting in the wings to give a final shove, but the defeat was almost always self induced. What makes you think that twenty-first century America is any different? Do the names of China, Brazil and India come to mind as our egoistic abusers are busy devouring the American middle class through which the powerful Republic was supported? Never, since the Civil War when Lee's Confederates occupied Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on the way to Philadelphia and possibly New York, has the Republic been in such danger. Eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty! We still have in our hands the power of the ballot to hamstring the wicked abusers who betray America by bleeding us white by concentrating even more of the world's wealth into their grasping hands.

Because of our anxiety about terrorist attacks and ignorance about Islam, we were traumatized on 9/11 and relentlessly propagandized to believe at least three impossible things the radical Republicans were peddling to naïve Americans before breakfast every morning. We immediately gave George W. Bush et al, the power needed to put many self-destructive scams into practice. No more than two dozen reactionary proto-fascists in the Congress and the White House propagandized America into supporting the disastrous Iraqi War that has America teetering on the slippery slope of a guerrilla conflict between civilizations. A great many Americans are just not bright or psychologically astute enough to see through the clever proto-fascist propaganda. It was as if our cultural memory about the ten years of the bloody Vietnam War had been erased by the aristocracy's seduction machine. We saluted and lined up, ready to sacrifice our kids and our wealth all over again when the war drums began to beat. Even ninety percent of the American Army's worker bees at risk in Iraq, have been so brainwashed by their officers that they still believe Saddam and Osama planned the 9/11 attacks together even though the men despised and distrusted each other. The soldiers still accept the spin, even after the Bush administration admitted in public it had been mistaken to make such an assumption.

We were so seduced that the neo-Confederates of the south and west, those rural minded true believers claiming the greatest patriotism, have joined political forces with the country club set that despises them as white trash, elitists that are doing everything possible to starve the middle class. Politics do make strange bed fellows! Fundamental preachers control the generally sexist and racist NASCAR bunch that never forgave the Democratic Party for forcing civil rights legislation down their throats a generation ago. The clergy rant about the wicked forces of liberalism and the eternal security of fundamental worship. On the other side of this strange equation, the financially affluent and politically sophisticated country club set sees through the financial scams but vote for proto-fascists politicians anyway because of the vast wealth in play.

Should you be tempted to discount the ability of rag-head tribal Muslims to cause even more American pain in a war between civilizations, as the Bush administration sold America a bill of goods about a splendid little war, try very hard to remember what only nineteen fundamental true believers did on that terrible day in September when we lost our innocence during the collapse of the Twin Towers. Can't you remember that not one Iraqi youngster attacked America on 9/11 and virtually no anti-American terrorists were operating out of Baghdad until we created them by occupying their homeland? Al Qaida came in later, but only after we made a multitude of enemies through our inept political and military occupation. Soon after 9/11, I wrote that a great many Arab peasants were going to die from a flood of American bombs and shells. I said at the time I hoped that a few of the slain would be guilty perpetrators, although I feared that most of them would be what is euphemistically called collateral damage by the military. Well, the count of collaterally dead Iraqis has already reached a hundred thousand men women and children. Of course, should you get your world news from hate radio ditto heads who propagandize incessantly to support reactionary politicians and fundamental preachers, you can blame the collapse of the middle class, the 9/11 attack and the ever more violent civil war on Bill and Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy and John Murtha and other liberals who want to get our kids out of the slaughter pens of the Middle East. You can even pretend that the Middle Eastern war isn't about dominating Middle Eastern petroleum by calling our neo-colonial war of conquest a justifiable struggle for the liberation of the Arab peoples, but that doesn't convert a lie into the truth. You can call a rabid skunk a loving Beagle, but you had better not invite it in as a house pet.

The radical Republican proto-fascists now slipping in the polls as the people finally realize who is betraying them and their military kids, did everything possible in their scam to deliver control of Middle Eastern petroleum to their oil barons. For, while the ideological users and abusers first argued that the Iraqi war was fought to protect us from weapons of mass destruction and then claimed to be converting vengeful and aggressive Afghani and Iraqi tribesmen to born again Jeffersonian democrats, few Americans and Europeans -- besides neurotic idiots and vested abusers -- still believe the radical Republican delusions. Only narcissistic true believers ignore the connection between the war and the billions and billions in windfall profits reaped by Texaco, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil and others after our invasion and the three years of drawn-out fighting sent energy costs through the roof. The Bush family has won millions of windfall dollars from their petroleum investments in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere while George has been in the White House. I believe this financial scheme is why Bush recently reiterated his mantra that we must win the war in Iraq at all costs -- and then keep an occupying force there indefinitely in order to defeat Al Qaeda's terrorists. Of course, I simply cannot believe that any member of the Bush family ever gave one hoot in Hades about delivering tattered and snaggle tooth Iraqi peasants from Saddam's clutches. The aristocratic first family simply doesn't think in those terms about the peasants of the world, according to the servants who have worked for the family through the years. The autocratic Republican view of personal freedom, certainly doesn't reflect the right of ordinary citizens to govern themselves and choose national policies through electing honest legislators. It is much more about relaxing regulations within authoritarian nations so their corporations can create lessez faire governments they operate on their own terms. That is proto-fascist democracy!

The Bush administration invaded Iraq to build a dozen or more permanent military bases in Iraq in order to dominate the Middle East oil fields with permanent American forces. It had absolutely nothing to do with democratic nation building until the WMD scam blew up in the president's face. These bases are why Iranian leaders are now frantic to produce a supply of their own nuclear weapons. The mullahs are not stupid, they can count to ten, and they have figured out that the United States, during the ten large and small wars we have fought since World Two, has never attacked a nation with nuclear arms. In our country where tens of millions of cargo containers are unloaded annually, with less than five percent of them visually inspected, a nation with its own nuclear bombs could smuggle a few ashore in any number of ways -- to be detonated aboard a boat near downtown Manhattan or from a truck crossing the Potomac Bridge into Washington. Obviously, they have no trouble finding suicide drivers. There was even a rumor that during the Cold War, the Soviets smuggled several nuclear weapons into New York and Washington and cached them in underground basements to use in the event of a nuclear war. The story is, they were surreptitiously removed when the Cold War ended during the Gorbachev era.

Obviously, George Bush is more than willing to continue trading American and Iraqi lives in order to increase the net worth of the already obscenely wealthy families who control the great oil companies. Why else would the Bush administration be building those military basses in Iraq while claiming to be creating a democracy? Bush and the narcissistic proto-fascist triad intended never to leave the poor desert nation, even if they must drown what is left of Iraqi society in blood. Moreover, can you really believe that while virtually every opinion page editor in America predicted the wartime surge in oil profits, the resistance of the Iraqi people to occupation and the civil war now in its opening stage, George Bush and his in-house proto-fascists couldn't foresee those consequences of their war? Obviously, a stubborn president convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still. They didn't want to see the consequences.

In his recent vow to continue the war for bringing his brand of freedom from taxes and restrictive regulations to the Middle East, Bush cleverly avoids defining either democracy or the conditions under which our weary troops shall come home. Some of the Guard and Regular units are now deploying for their third and fourth tours of duty in Iraq. And while they are magnificent young men and woman, (I served among their predecessors in the Brown Shoe Army Air Forces), too much is enough. Military marriages are breaking up and the V A hospital I use is filled with kids suffering terrible head wounds. Homes, automobiles and careers are being lost through continuous deployment. And the count now goes past twenty thousand wounded and dead American for the greater glory of Texaco, British Petroleum and several others.

The financial elite are spending so much money corrupting radical politicians and fundamental preachers that the strengths of democracy are collapsing around us. Radical legislators with well filled coffers and reactionary Supreme Court justices with overcompensated egos now serve the proto-fascist aristocracy rather the middle class in virtually every important issue. The greedy manipulators, as personified by three or four generations of the Bush family, understand that they don't need to conduct a banana republic type revolution to control virtually everything they choose. All they need do is spend one ten thousandths of one percent of their profits to bribe a few hundred greedy members of congress. That expenditure is a great deal less than paying living wages to twenty or thirty million middle-class workers. The formerly highly placed economist within the Federal Reserve, Milton Friedman, stated that the only moral responsibility of a business organization is to increase profits. At all costs? By dumping poisonous wastes into your community's drinking water to save money -- or by hastening global warning or by spreading carcinogenic chemicals far and wide by refusing to waste money on scrubbers for your smokestacks?

Bought and paid for reactionary economists, obviously reject the idea that taxes are the price we pay for civilization with sound public schools, good roads, opportunities for disenfranchised families to come into the middle class, affordable medical care and decent retirement benefits. Their narcissistic patrons want it all. The vast Bush tax reduction program made him a hero from the beginning of his first administration. It must have soothed his wounded ego for a few months for he was soon back asking for another fix. Kitty Kelly reported that the Bush family mind set includes just two kinds of men and women. Most people are among the inconsequential workers of society who salute and obey their betters. Then there are the real people, the few members of elite country clubs with whom the Bush family plays golf and tennis. All of which leaves them virtually no interest in and no concern for a working middle class except to fight their wars and do the labor needed to keep their enterprises profitable across the world. After all, the middle class bees siphon off far too much wealth that would otherwise go into their own coffers.

From the beginning of the current administration, even as Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld began the continuous drum beat to gain support for the Iraqi War with their weapons of mass destruction scam, the invasion really was about controlling Middle Eastern oil. No one could stop them; even as George was pretending to seek ways to avoid an invasion, he and Tony Blair had already resurrected the British dream of a born again Middle Eastern Empire. This pretense was only one of the many deceptions Bush used to pull the wool over American eyes. It was easy after the proto-fascists had a firm grip on the levers of American power. The White House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and much of the Supreme Court were firmly in their hands. They still are, as Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Alioto convinced the neo-fascists of their parallel mind sets during a very careful vetting before their names ever appeared on the evening news. The Middle East campaign was really about oil and wealth while everything about weapons of mass destruction, defeating Iraqi terrorists and bringing democracy to the unwashed peasants of the region has been a stream of deceit spun to manipulate Americans by the proto-fascists of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, when it turned out so wrong, as the victory was botched, the happiest man in the world about our occupation of Iraq must have been Osama Bin Ladin. The ignorant and hubristic members of the administration delivered him a golden opportunity on a silver platter. Osama recruited fiercely anti-American suicidal youngsters against whom there is little defense except protecting everyone and everything of value in the Green Zone of Baghdad. Many anxious or naïve American gave the narcissistic proto-fascist triad of politicians, preachers and plutocrats every opportunity to succeed in their debilitating scam. The reactionary Republican Congress gave the manipulators carte blanche from the beginning. They were like two fisted drinkers, filling and refilling the whiskey glass for the President. The manipulators created a massive national debt for our descendents to suffer 0ver by spending massive amounts of treasure on a scam war while cutting taxes for the proto-fascists. The autocrats betrayed the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The greedy turned the Clinton budget surplus into a massive debt for the next generation to struggle under, with the pretense that the vast tax cuts would create an economic boon that would more than restore the difference. It was all an ideological lie.

Fortunately, as Lincoln said; While you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. A majority of the American people now see how poorly Bush and his administration has done. About two thirds of the American people and nine tenths of the Western World's citizens no longer believe much of anything Bush says nor trusts him to make sound decisions. Like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Indochina era, he yearned desperately to heal his wounded ego with the healing balm or power and prestige, to become known as one of the greatest American presidents. He challenged history to put him on a pedestal with Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. But he entangled himself as did Johnson and Nixon, in a disastrous scam for all the wrong reasons and now has guaranteed for himself the scorn of history. Alas, it is not in their unlucky stars that men falter and fail -- but in their very souls. The psycho-spiritual failings of George Bush, come right out of his soul's ego wounds. Bush had an opportunity to do great things for America after the 9/11 attack but although he seemed to be off to a good start, he soon faltered and chose to betray America to give greater wealth and power to his aristocratic manipulators. Most Americans now believe that he is a man in over his depth, who faltered when his high office ambitions put him to the test. Beware, your sins shall find you out. It need not have been so, he could have been one of the great presidents had he served America half as well as he took care of the proto-fascist aristocracy.

Virtually all middle class Americans, already frustrated by global capitalism's transfer of the wealth of our society to the financial elite, deeply wanted to believe that George Bush was a strong and compassionate leader who would see us safely through the terrorist threat. Unfortunately, many were seduced to see him in this light by the propaganda machine. Even those of us who early on saw his psycho-spiritual weaknesses as an alcoholic, womanizing draft dodger who suffered a leadership ineptitude that led to the bankruptcy of his three oil companies and near collapse of his family, wanted him to succeed. We hoped that the disastrous reduction of public school, infrastructure, environmental and healthcare support when he was governor of Texas, was an aberration. We prayed that his execution of one hundred fifty Texas men was somehow justified. We wanted to see the compassionate, spiritually minded Christian leader he claimed to be emerge from the macho mechanisms. We wanted him to preserve the best elements of the American way of life and to improve the plight of the needy. Unfortunately, his compassionate conservatism was all smoke and mirrors. Bush almost immediately reverted to the image of toughness that is so much a part of the neo-Confederate or NASCAR mythology that exists across much of the rural south and west, as far north as the Dakotas. It is so virulent in Kansas and Texas and rural Colorado that one native son wrote the book, "What's Wrong With Kansas"? The abusive men in the movie Thelma And Louise, whose lives peaked at this level, would still be supporting George Bush today had they been real persons. Many anxious and frustrated Americans welcomed Bush's aggressive gunfighter rhetoric from the West Texas oil patch. Many still do for they are creatures of tradition and ideology rather than adaptation and intellect. The NASCAR bunch remains willing to sacrifice its young people to the Iraqi War for Bush who claims to be a tough guy when he really is an illusion of a strong and competent leader.

Most of the neo-Confederate are too unsophisticated politically or socially to understand that while all politicians talk tough when campaigning, once they are incumbents they must compromise and form coalitions in order to be effective. A lone wolf is always an outcast in a legislative body. Even the fiercely ideological Ronald Reagan matured beyond his John Wayne style "Make my day" campaign rhetoric and graciously entertained Mr. and Mrs. Gorbachev as house guests in the White House. He made it possible for himself and the Soviet leader to forge the accommodations that ended the Cold War without fighting World War Three. There was no such maturing in George Bush's leadership style for he had internalized the Texas gunfighter mythology as a defense mechanism in order to protect his wounded ego. Because of the many free floating anxieties that long bedeviled him with alcoholism and sexual infidelity, George had overcompensated psycho-spiritually during childhood and created for himself ego defenses that allow him to justify his aggressive hair trigger approach to life. He still has the unconscious fears of an addictive personality, although he no longer drinks. I fear he is what Alcoholics Anonymous counselors call a dry drunk. His character is far more aggressive than his often charming public persona reveals and there are several reasons for his resentment and aggression.

According to the vast majority of psychotherapists, virtually all ideologically reactionary and fundamental true believers are fearful men and women who are never completely comfortable with strangers who have not proven their unconditional support in every circumstance. For example, the enraged men and women who ran amok trying to keep Terry Schaivo alive artificially when the poor shell of a woman was decaying as we watched, are deeply fearful people who were responding to their own anxiety about death. Allowing Terry's husband to disconnect the feeding tube confirmed their hidden fears that dangerous people surround them and could turn against they, themselves. Slightly different were the fears those who broke many state and federal laws to block the return of Emilio Gonzales to his father in Cuba. The anxious upper class Cuban refugees had long been mourning the loss of their personal possessions and property in the old country. Thus, returning six year old Emilio represented the loss of their former prestige and power over the working class of Cubans who remained at home so they resisted making their point. The men and women who spend years of their lives agitating for congressional amendments to block the teaching of evolution and global warming, who agonize for years about homosexuals forming marriage-like unions and joining their congregations, are terrified of changes that their fearful egos are unable to tolerate. The vast majority of true believers, whether in democracies or dictatorships, in Christianity, Islam and Judaism really do feel threatened much of the time even when there is nothing tangible to cause their anxiety attacks. Psychotherapists call this free floating anxiety, and it developed from pain and stress during childhood. Some sufferers believe that their enemies will cripple or slay them -- unless they neutralize or even slay them first. This is why the reactionary men and women feel no more compassion from the slaughter of a hundred thousand Iraqis than their fundamental predecessors did when the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon war was destroying more than two million Vietnamese farmers and fishermen.

Bush responds automatically to challenges by taking numbers and kicking butts -- the ultimate parody of a macho man, verbally if not physically. He simply cannot resist a challenge for that would prove to himself that he is still that little kid that suffered so much pain. You can see the resentment in his face when a reporter dares to doubt him, even when he himself knows he is deceiving the people. His ego is so fragile that he cannot stand being corrected for that was part and parcel of his childhood. If he doesn't strike back, his many enemies shall see through his gunfighter façade. He is very combative -- except of course, when he had an opportunity to transfer to the U S Air Force from the Texas National Guard. When the Air Force needed fighter pilots to fly combat in the Vietnam War, he went like a rabbit, even forcing the Guard to take him from flight status. Nevertheless, he still presents himself as a macho warrior. Of course, he never sees this as a scam, for our ego defenses are almost always invisible to ourselves. He has unconsciously papered over his wounds, has hidden them deep in his ego, which then requires much of his psyche energy to keep them from boiling over for everyone to see. Even after we stuff painful and dangerous elements out of sight and out of mind within the unconscious aspects of our mind, they are never concealed forever and forgotten. Neurotics always use too much of their psychic energy to keep their secrets submerged so they don't boil out to betray us at inappropriate times. A person who stuffs too many unpleasant episodes into his or her unconscious never becomes as intelligent, as creative, and as persuasive or as loving as he or she would have been had they not been emotionally wounded along the way. Of course, ideological true believers need enemies in order to explain to themselves the anxieties that often harass them. They need them as much as emotionally maturing men and women need lovers.

From time to time Bush reveals how weak his tough guy approach really is. He is in essence telling a hundred fifty thousand young Americans -- Lets you and him fight to the death! And why not -- for he and the entire narcissistic triad of politicians, preachers and plutocrats see working class boys and girls who volunteer for military service because they cannot find decent jobs in the global economy, as resources to be consumed to protect their own ideologies. Of course they cannot express their narcissism openly to the country without alienating a great many people so they must find logical sounding reasons to behave as they do. Bush justified his war with the scam about mass weapons and when that story blew apart, seduced patriotic Americans into sacrificing their sons and daughters with their song and dance about the Iraqis lining up to greet us as liberators. Can't you close your eyes and absorb the deep compassion of kindly men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Card, as they agonize through long nights over poor struggling boys and girls from all over America? Now that the second scam has failed, now that it seems few in Iraq are going to desert their tribal traditions, Republican narcissists blame the media for withholding the real story of how our forces are winning the Bush war. Wouldn't you just love to see Cheney or Rumsfeld or DeLay, Frist and Santorum, or even Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell take a long walk through Baghdad some evening, chatting with the Iraqi voters about the effectiveness of their power grid and water and sewage systems?

A vast number reactionary Americans wanted Bush and his band go on the offensive against Arabs, even when he had to break a hundred thousand innocent heads along the way. After all, the Iraqis were Arabs and the rag heads were some of those many enemies that surround radical men and women, evildoers who deserved what they get in any bombing strike. The fearful Congress gave Bush carte blanche to lie and cheat, even with Tony Blair of England, to defy the Constitution, to leave parents grieving the loss of their boys and girls who have been wounded and slain for the benefit of the oil company barons. Many anxious Americans failed to understand that the proto-fascists' loud and long mantra about their personal patriotism, repeated over and over by the ideologues, really is the last refuge of a great many scoundrels. We simply didn't realize that Bush, who had already failed in virtually every activity in his faux macho lifestyle, was not going to mature psycho-spiritually as president. We accepted the ancient myth that electing neurotic incompetents like Polk, Grant and Arthur to the presidency turns them into cool headed statesman. Unfortunately, aggressive quips, contempt for the third class working people of America and a rigid inability to change course when the iceberg appears dead ahead, does not a strong president make. This is why Cheney, Rove and Card, until he got sacked, continue to run the shop while Bush tours the country as a figurehead, appearing only before handpicked true believers, trying to resurrect his approval numbers. His repressed anxieties and the many neurotic defense mechanisms hidden in his soul, were papered over by his spin doctors until the wheels fell off his wagon because of his determination to win his war.

Only recently Bush insisted during a long press conference that his successor in the Oval Office shall have to keep an American occupation force in Iraq long after his own term as president is past. He must, he said, or we would have sacrificed those twenty thousand dead and wounded with so much treasure spent in vain, when trying to bring the blessings of democracy to the tribesmen of Iraq. He sounds very much like a man convicted of slaying his parents and then throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan! Of course, any reactionary replacement president shall automatically oblige him -- a permanent occupation with garrisoned forces ready to strike across the Middle East was the proto-fascist scheme from the beginning. Only the naïve voters failed to see that. But when the worst came to pass, when political disaster loomed, George botched things so badly that a more progressive successor in the White House shall find it difficult to withdraw our troops from danger without giving a great advantage to the Iranian leadership. The proto-fascists of the Bush administration gave their scam about Iraq their best shot by telling every lie they could concoct, by wasting our youngsters and by spinning every blunder so that horse manure smells for a while to the naïve, like attar of roses.

Virtually every assumption the administration made about Iraqi society was based on ignorance and hubris. Our abusers casually unleashed a tidal wave of resentment and rage against America that shall be a generation or more subsiding, even if it doesn't boil over into a war between civilizations that disrupts the flow of oil to the industrial nations and pitches us into a world wide depression. Not since the run-up to our Civil War when egoistic enemies behaved so badly, has the law of unintended consequences been so fraught with peril for America. The neo-cons' failure is obvious as virtually everyone without vested interests in the domination of the Middle East now understands. Many Americans simply do not believe much of anything George Bush now to justify his choices. The neo-con movement has shot its wad, has run its course, has shown itself to be lacking in wisdom, virtues or emotional maturity. Two thirds of Americans and over ninety percent of Europeans now understand that Bush is a poor president who cannot be trusted to do what is best for anyone except the exclusive country club set that is more than willing to spend the lives of any number of poor American kids and Iraqi peasants for their own benefit. Bush's handlers tried to propagandize him into greatness but that illusion has collapsed as completely as when Dorothy chased Toto into the smoke and reflections of the Wizard of Oz's control room within the Emerald City. Fortunately, fewer and fewer Americans are listening to George Bush and his clever, always articulate handlers. Even his steadfast belief in the rightness of his cause, is now being seen as the neurotic stubbornness of a man who has failed at virtually everything he's ever tried to accomplish. He cannot change his course of action about anything without feeling that he has been bested by someone, that his secret weaknesses shall be revealed for all to see. You simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time -- even the dullest true believers eventually recognize who is beating them about the face and head!

Finally, after years of incessant deceptions about everything from mot having made up his mind about an invasion, to weapons of mass destruction -- to a terrorist plot between Saddam and Osama and the justification of tens of thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, on to organizing secret Star Chamber courts and hiding torture centers around the world and using illegal entrapment -- a majority of men and women across all of our civilization have become disenchanted with this American President. We once wasted vast amounts of wealth, almost a quarter million wounded and sixty thousand dead while pretending that South Vietnam was a real country that was vital to American interests. We stayed the bloody course in their civil war and fought wars against our students in our streets, because both Johnson and Nixon were too deeply wounded psycho-spiritually to admit their mistakes and get us out of Indochina. And while Iraq is another situation, this is looking more and more like another civil war between opposing tribes. Seemingly, during every generation, the American financial aristocracy boils over in greed and hubris enough to start another war for our poor and middle class sons and daughters to bleed die in, while their own children go to graduate school and reap massive financial benefits. While Bush was playing with aircraft as a weekend warrior, Cheney was getting six draft deferments that kept him far danger. We let them get away with it while buying politicians and preachers and by propagandizing naïve Americans into pulling their chestnuts from the fires of war by appealing to our patriotism.

One major ego defense mechanism appears in the way that Bush insists he doesn't care what anyone feels about the state of his presidency. If he is sincere about that, if he really doesn't care, he is the first politician in the last five hundred years who didn't agonize after losing control of his schemes. No emotionally healthy person fails to care what others think of he himself. Because we all need praise and rewards rather than criticism and punishment, only persons who have been criticized and abused repeatedly in childhood build up so much emotional scar tissue that they lose the capacity to care. As J R R Tolkien demonstrated in his massive Lord Of The Rings saga, persons who spend their entire lives grubbing for wealth and power, make so many selfish compromises that they lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. This ego distortion comes from suffering such emotional pain that one concludes he or she is surrounded by enemies who don't deserve a second thought, that most people are idiots who cannot understand the inner life of such a significant person as I am. It is a sad state of affairs in any neurotic person's soul when he or she needs to rationalize defeat, must pretend that everyone but I myself alone is out of step. George grew up in an elite family that expected excellence in all things -- an excellence that George simply could not deliver to his parents and teachers because of his dyslexia. Bush developed both a hair trigger response to correction because he faced so much criticism as a learning disabled child -- and an ability to hide painful events in his unconscious. Now, after a half century of practice, he must be hit in the head with an ax handle to make him respond to anyone who tries to pry him out of his ego's comfort zone. This stubborn defense mechanism, which many people initially confused with strength of character, comes from his painful childhood when he was under severe pressure because of his dyslexia.

He had to have felt incompetent and inept when he couldn't keep up in school, although he was as intelligent as most of the kids. His difficulty with spoken language and his difficulty when reading, according to Bush biographers, triggered enormous pressures from his parents who wanted a son worthy of the honored family name. I was the Director of a learning and learning disabilities clinic in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin and I never examined a dyslexic child that did not suffer a severe psychological overlay because of this failure to master written and spoken language. Symptoms vary but one of the most common ego wounds is a failure to adapt when one's life strategy fails. One definition of neuroticism includes making the same unsuccessful response to a problem, never changing anything, although expecting a more satisfying result the next time through. I can hear John Wayne's movie voice echoing in George Bush's head. "Never apologize Mister. It is a sign of weakness!" Many children adopt various kinds of self-defeating techniques when under emotional pressure. Some lock themselves in an emotional prison with defense mechanisms of their own making for the rest of their lives. They seldom realize their immature attempts to avoid ego pain always cause more problems than they solve. Most fearful neurotic sufferers need psychotherapy or a spiritual restoration in order to recover. And of course, a macho west Texas gunslinger must never become introspective and cannot apologize, for that would confirm the weaknesses he has tried all his life to conceal. And he can trust only those hirelings who have proven themselves to be supportive regardless of his blunders, which is why he has replace only Card from his exhausted and faltering staff. He feels more comfortable with trusted blunderers rather than with brilliant newcomers and everything George does is related in some way to staying sober and in his comfort zone.

It seems obvious to me that Bush is limited by a dyslexic single focus world view that protects him from confusion and self-doubt by playing all of life's tunes on the one string of his intellectual instrument. The reason why he has never read through a single book since leaving college is a common one to the learning disabled. It comes from his cognitive inability to organize the material intellectually. Because George cannot manage ambiguous issues that require sophisticated logic in order to understand them, he has selected two or three life themes and now plays them so incessantly that naive people like the NASCAR bunch and even grieving parents, who desperately seek some justification for the death or maiming of their children in a vicious war, eventually accept them as true. Advertising psychologists report that any message heard more than ten or twelve times becomes embedded in the listeners mind and is accepted as the truth regardless of how absurd. This is why George used the words terrorism and terrorists almost twenty times in a recent speech. It is the only effective tune in his repertory and he must play it or stay mute.

His macho defenses, combined with his current political, financial and military power, has led Bush to make more and more disastrous choices. Half a dozen former assistants, associates and cabinet members have complained how remarkably passive and uncurious George is during his meetings. Only recently he sat through a long briefing on the rebuilding of New Orleans without asking a single question. I suspect he knows that entering into a give and take dialogue about important issues would reveal the poverty of his intellect, his inability to wrap his mind around complex issues. Better to be silent and be thought a dunce than to speak out and remove all doubt about it! Especially if you already know all the satisfactory answers. Bush simplistically hears what he expects to hear about virtually all issues, runs it thorough his reactionary political and fundamental religious mind set and then coughs out an automatic decision that reflects his limited flexibility. I'm confident that the pandering to his one string instrument by the ambitious members of his staff and cabinet is constant. To George, pensive or deliberate men appear weak and incompetent. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who literally recreated his own body in order to feel significance and powerful, calls logical thinkers girly men. Virtually every macho man intuitively feels that the world is a dangerous place in which dominance, aggression and retribution is far more valuable than collegiality, peacekeeping and forgiveness. They learn this mode of life early in a painful childhood or adolescence.

Bush and other proto-fascist handlers fear and hate a world that is filled with shades of gray -- because they think in stark black and white values in a dangerous world filled with enemies. George cannot allow himself to be distracted by nuances. For example, his insistence that the fundamental Islamic clergy and laity of Iraq would welcome an invading infidel army as liberators, betrayed his profound cultural ignorance about the billion or so Muslims he challenged to -- Bring it on. That aggressive macho attitude seems to have become dominant in his life during junior high but his dissatisfaction had to have developed earlier than that. Unfortunately, President Bush has reached a level of governance where everything is incredibly complex because of all those nuances he rejects. There is virtually nothing a president can do to serve one segment of humanity that doesn't frustrate another group or two. For example, in order to serve his aristocratic few well, he is more than willing to strip almost everything good from Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. He will rationalize destroying labor unions that created the middle class so as to please Chamber of Commerce members and end Roe vs. Wade freedom of choice to please his anti-choice neo-Confederate base. The windfall gasoline profits his war in Iraq created for the oil companies was ripped from the American people through higher fuel and heating costs. He rationalizes these choices because either unconsciously or perhaps consciously, the financial aristocracy really does consider itself more patriotic and more spiritual than the insignificant rank and file people they use and discard to create more wealth for they, themselves.

For example, at one of the Texas nominating conventions that Bush and his family attended, a large section of carefully coifed, designer clad and heavily bejeweled proto-fascist Republican women stood and chanted: We are the true Americans -- We are the real Christians. The women chanted for ten minutes or so as the Bush contingent cheered them and the frightening thing is that aristocratic women and men really believe such drivel and make wicked choices that reflect their scorn of everyone outside their elite country clubs and guarded and gated multimillion dollar mansions. George Bush apparently handles the inevitable ambiguities of life by resolving every problem with ideological solutions that benefit most his autocratic contributors and their vassals. I doubt he has ever asked Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove or Dick Cheney the thoughtful question posed regularly by effective leaders -- What could go wrong if I accept the course of action you are recommending? Or, more specifically, is there any way our military could still be bogged down in Iraq and I myself suffering a thirty-six percent approval rating three years after we defeated Saddam's forces? There are enough major reasons that George Bush should be sacked.

STARTING THE MIDDLE EASTERN WAR
DEVOURING OUR MILITARY FORCES
CREATING THE NATIONAL DEFICIT
WEAKENING THE MIDDLE CLASS
RAVISHING THE ENVIRONMENT
DESTROYING DEMOCRACY
BRIBING THE CONGRESS
LYING TO THE PEOPLE

Of course, while Bush deserves to be impeached and convicted of many gross crimes and misdemeanors, he and his aristocratic supporters have outfoxed us once more. A successful impeachment would move an even more dangerous autocrat, Richard Cheney, into the White House. God alone knows what havoc he would cause our middle class democracy once he became the American president. Rather than impeach Bush, we should probably get out and use the ballot box to elect enough progressive legislators to neuter this inept president and those who are crippling the America Republic through their neurotic and near psychopathic greed. We must do everything necessary to re-establish the middle class that made America prosperous and strong for so long.



http://www.fulfillmentforum.com

JARD DeVILLE is the author, founder and co-owner with his daughter, Dee, of THE FULFILLMENT FORUM. The FORUM is the publisher and purveyor of the list of fine e-books at http://www.fulfillmentforum.com. He has published more than a score psychology books, seminars, assessment instruments and novels and was psychology professor and chair at Olivet and Westminster Colleges. He taught leadership psychology seminars for years at the Universities of Wisconsin, Indiana, Purdue and Arizona and for executives and managers of major firms from New York, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles, Singapore, Brisbane, Auckland et al. He served as a pastor in a fundamental religious denomination for seven years before resigning because of the cruel racism and sexism rampant there.

What can be safely said is this: Poverty is up by nearly 50 percent since this president took office. Somewhere between five and ten million Americans have lost their health insurance. Income inequality is the highest since the 1920s. Real median income has declined five consecutive years, the longest such streak since the Great Depression. And the Bush budget cuts have left Americans with the most threadbare social safety net since that dreadful era.

Almost 30 percent of American manufacturing jobs have been lost over these past five years. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 13 percent of our Gross Domestic Product, while the finance, insurance and real estate sector accounts for greater than 20 percent. Under Bush, moving money around has surpassed making things as the greatest share of our GDP.

Bush inherited massive budget surpluses but has turned those into massive deficits. While our net foreign indebtedness took over 200 years to reach $1 trillion, just since 2001 it has increased by another $3 trillion. While just five years ago our national debt stood at just over $5 trillion, now it stands at over $8 trillion. America has become a rentier nation, living off unearned income and racking up millions more debt every second of every day. Why don't you mind?

The trade deficit has exploded to over $800 billion per year, and the United States is having to borrow more than $2 billion per day to pay for our profligacy. And it is China – our greatest strategic adversary – that loans us much of those sums. Never could anyone have imagined that the most powerful nation the world has ever known would give its most threatening competitor such direct control over its economic destiny. Where is your sense of indignation?

It does not matter, not much anyway, to Bush Republicans that their out-of-control spending and their tax cuts for the rich have driven this nation into a downward spiral of debt. The spend-and-spend, big business, cheap labor, big government, socially regressive Republican Party has also become the political vehicle of the radically religious who, believing Jesus is coming at any minute, believe therefore that long-term fiscal responsibility is of little matter, to say nothing of social and environmental responsibility.

Under Bush, the United States has become the world's leading Bible-reading crusader state, led by a congregation of born-again politicians enriching the rich under the guise of Christian compassion, and brandishing Bibles as public policy guides. Rather than public policy based on the national interest, our government's public policy is now largely based on faith. Faith-based social policy, faith-based war, faith-based science, faith-based education, and faith-based medicine, all are leading our nation down a faith-based road to ruin. Why don't you mind?

Corruption is rampant. Money spent each year by lobbyists in Washington has doubled to $3 billion in just the past six years. Cronies with little experience are given high-ranking positions, or offered Supreme Court judgeships, or given no-bid contracts worth tens of billions of dollars.

The Republican majority leader in the House is under indictment and was forced to resign his leadership position. The Republican majority leader in the Senate is under investigation for insider trading. One Republican congressman has been convicted on bribery charges, and more indictments of GOP members are expected this year as lobbyist-in-disgrace Jack Abramoff spills his guts to the FBI in return for a reduced sentence. Where is your sense of indignation?

The Vice-President's Chief of Staff resigned under indictment for leaking the name of a covert CIA operative. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is continuing his investigation, which may even lead to indictments of the two White House pit bulls: Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. Meanwhile, the White House smite squad tears down all who dare disagree with its policies, or leave the congregation under protest. It blames the media when it all too occasionally goes off-message and reports the real news.

Bush himself was asleep at the switch on 9/11, ignoring a memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside the United States". He was asleep at the switch before Katrina washed away a major American city and almost as many people as who died on 9/11. And he is asleep at the switch as the world faces a potential catastrophe in global warming. Why don't you mind?

The extent of the disaster that is the Bush presidency is almost beyond cataloguing. Space does not allow for more, except for the worst: Iraq. The war on Iraq, based at best on faulty intelligence and at worst on outright lies has proved a gigantic distortion of national priorities. It has grievously, perhaps irreparably, damaged America's moral standing in the world. It has caused nearly 2500 American deaths and tens of thousands of Iraqi. It has consumed our treasury to the tune of half a trillion dollars thus far, with no end in sight.

The war on Iraq has sapped our military, our credibility, our economy, and our morale, and has alienated much of the world. The illegal detention and abuse by American soldiers of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo have led the Muslim world to believe that democracy is just another costume for tyranny. And, worst of all, the war on Iraq has diverted our attention from destroying the chief culprit of 9/11, and has allowed the greater threats to our country – North Korea and Iran – to build nuclear weapons programs out of fear of being next on Bush's "axis-of-evil" hit list.

So what can you do? It is easy to feel helpless, or to lapse into indifference. But what these perilous times cannot bear is indifference. We can no longer stand on the sidelines and wait for some non-existent catalyst to suddenly appear and mobilize a movement that we can then join. It is past time to take action. The profile of courage required is in the mirror.

Write letters to the editor. Write letters to your congressional representatives. Call your congressional representatives. Join your local Democratic Party. Talk to your family, friends, co-workers, and fellow members of your congregation about writing, calling, and joining together.

No, there is no easy answer. But "no easy answer" is not a synonym for "let's give up". Rather, it just means "we have to be more imaginative and work harder and do more and work together to make things right". We must come alive with the immediacy of our challenges. The time for turning our great nation away from the road to ruin is fast passing.

Todd Huffman is a pediatrician and political columnist in Eugene, Oregon. He is a regular contributor to the Springfield (OR) News, the Portland (OR) Oregonian, the Eugene (OR) Register-Guard, the Washington Free Press, and the Columbus Free Press.

Filling in for President George Bush, who was en route to a summit in Mexico, Cheney poked fun at himself and others at the 62nd annual Radio & Television Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington Wednesday night.

Referring to the accidental shooting of a lawyer while quail hunting in Texas earlier this year, Cheney squinted into the bright lights.

"The lighting could be better but I can still see the whites of your eyes," he said.

He accompanied his routine with a slide show, and one picture showed him in a room crowded with revelers and Cheney in the center, sitting and poring over a stack of documents.

"I know how to have fun," he said. "I'm a real party animal."

And as he talked about a meeting he was supposed to have with the president, slide after slide showed Cheney alone, The Washington Post reported.

Google is setting up a political operation in Washington and collecting big-name lobbyists with Republican connections faster than you can search the Web for Jack Abramoff.

At first, I thought it was another of those famed Google April Fools' Day jokes, just a week early. They may have pioneered a new business model, but they're apparently relying on politics-as-usual. The question is, why do they have to?

Google argues that it has to play the game to maintain the ability of all Internet users to get quality, high-speed access to the Web. If the Internet service providers -- Comcast, TimeWarner and others -- are able to charge for transmitting information over the pipes, the Internet could become segregated into haves and have-nots. This is why Network neutrality -- or Net neutrality -- is important, and it is a good thing that Google is opposing the ISPs on this.

Google wants "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible." But what doesn't make sense is the choice to abandon unconventional ways. Google appears to have embraced the rules of the so-called K Street Project. For a decade or more, Republicans in Congress have used the K Street Project to strong-arm businesses to hire only Republican lobbyists and to make donations only to GOP candidates.

Google has hired Washington powerhouse lobbying firm Podesta Mattoon. Though known as a bipartisan firm, Podesta Mattoon will probably hand this account to Lauren Maddox, a former staffer for Newt Gingrich. And Google has retained public relations flak Stuart Roy, recently of indicted Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay's staff, to direct its political PR and strategy. They are also setting up a D.C. office and have hired old Republican hand Harry W. Clark, who claims the company will soon hire a political director with ties to Republicans.

And it won't end with hires: "The folks I've talked to," Clark told The New York Times, "everybody recognizes that the employee contributions were weighted heavily toward Democrats, and they're waiting to see a course correction." (Since 2001, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, Google employees have donated $361,294 to federal candidates, parties and political action committees, with all but roughly $10,000 going to Democrats or their allies.)

But is a course correction the right move? Is there a better way to conduct politics, perhaps found within Google's own business model?

What would a true Google approach to politics look like? It probably wouldn't wear a suit, charge $500 an hour or perpetuate an exclusive campaign finance system in which a few well-connected corporations, interest groups and wealthy donors win out while the rest of us get left behind. Google has retained public relations flak Stuart Roy, recently of indicted Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay's staff, to direct its political PR and strategy.

Take the Net neutrality debate. Instead of obeying consultants in Washington who will urge Google executives to give more to Republicans (or to Democrats if they take back Congress), what if Google worked to hand the Net neutrality issue over to the people? Instead of setting up an office in Washington, what about setting up a virtual campaign center on the Web?

Let's make this debate about what is right about democracy in America by engaging citizens and asking them to join the fray. Americans don't need a clash of the corporate titans, with both sides claiming to be pro-consumer. We don't want to be spoken for. If Net neutrality is won with an insider strategy without engaging real people, it will be fought all over again next year.

It's time for some new, citizen-focused paradigms in politics, in how campaigns are run -- like the Clean Elections bill moving through the California state legislature -- and in how people relate to elected officials on important issues. It is already happening all around us with open-source approaches to politics like CivicSpace and Colorado-based ProgressNow, the political blogosphere with sites like DailyKos, and online fundraising. Why would Google place its bets on K Street rather than nurturing, pioneering and accelerating this innovation and change?

"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one," company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin said when they announced the innovative IPO auction almost two years ago.

So, Google, what shall it be? A complete political upgrade? Or politics as usual?

In its effort to uphold the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), the U.S. Department of Justice is leaving no stone unturned. Its widely reported issuance of subpoenas to Internet search companies AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo is just the tip of the iceberg: The government has demanded information from at least 34 Internet service providers, search companies, and security software firms.

Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued subpoenas to a broad range of companies, including AT&T, Comcast Cable, Cox Communications, EarthLink, LookSmart, SBC Communications (then separate from AT&T), Symantec, and Verizon.

Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment, citing that the litigation was ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government.

The documents presented to InformationWeek reveal that some companies did object to the government's demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as "overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome."

In a letter sent to the Department of Justice in August, Joseph Serino Jr., an attorney representing Verizon, voiced similar objections. However, he clearly states that his objections are routine and intended to protect the company.

The one exceptional objection he cites has to do with the sensitivity of the information sought. Serino said Verizon Online is concerned that documents might be forwarded to people working for entities hostile to Verizon Online, or that are suing the company, including the Justice Department itself and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Verizon didn't respond to requests for comment.

The subpoenas were issued between June and September 2005. Beyond AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo, the only other search engine subpoenaed was LookSmart.

It's likely, however, that the government's interest in LookSmart stems not from the company's search engine, but from its ownership of Internet content filtering software company Net Nanny.

LookSmart declined to comment about the information it was asked for and the information it provided. EarthLink likewise declined to comment.

The bulk of the subpoenas were directed at Internet service providers and makers of content filtering software. The effectiveness of filtering technology is a critical issue in the COPA case. If the Department of Justice can prove that filters fail to shield minors from explicit material online, COPA may well be reinstated.

The full list of companies subpoenaed by the Department of Justice includes: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, AT&T, Authentium, BellSouth, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, SurfControl, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.

The subpoenas directed at security software companies asked for a substantial amount of information, including any and all documents that fall into 29 separate categories, including the kinds of content filtering products or services offered, the number of customers using those products or services, how users configure their filters, how filters get updated, R&D spending on such products, the methodology used to generate blacklisted or filtered sites, and pretty much any data gathered that relates to the use of filters.

"What they are doing, from our perspective, is engaging in a massive fishing expedition in an attempt to find some shred of evidence that they think can change a result they didn't like, which is that COPA violates the First Amendment," says Aden Fine, an attorney for the ACLU.

While the government's demands for information from Internet search engines have privacy implications for individuals, its interest in corporate information raises questions about the rights of businesses.

Stephen Ryan, a partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips in Washington D.C., considers the scope of the government's discovery efforts unusual. "I'm not surprised that the Google piece looks like the tip of an iceberg," he says. "But it is sort of surprising that they're using their authority this broadly."

Ryan acknowledges that government subpoenas place undue burdens on companies every day, noting that there are probably scores of attorneys at large ISPs who do nothing but process subpoenas. He suggests that as information technology produces more information, the government will want greater access to that data.

With regard to the financial impact of subpoenas, Ryan notes, "If you look at the Office of Regulatory Affairs at Office of Management and Budget, there's something called the Paperwork Reduction Act. And there's supposed to be an evaluation of the burden that a government law or regulation will make on the public. I'll bet there's never been a burden analysis of what they're doing."

Justice Department spokesman Miller said he would inquire about this, but didn't have an immediate answer.

Dan Jude, however, did. Jude, president of filtering software company Security Software Systems, confirms that the subpoena his 12-person company received was a burden. "It was a pain," he says. "I don't have exact figures, but it took 40-plus hours to put stuff together."

Jude says the Department of Justice asked for proprietary information about his company's content filtering software. Despite assurances that the information would remain confidential, he says he refused that particular demand, fearing it might be revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request.

Jude contends that the government's efforts to prop up COPA are misguided. "It's a waste of time," he says, noting that he testified before the COPA Commission about the prevalence of explicit material online in August 2000. The problem, he says, is that U.S. legislation has no teeth because half of the Web servers with explicit content are located in other countries.

If COPA were to be reinstated, Jude suggests that the Department of Justice would have to turn ISPs into content police in order to deal with offshore offenders.

As someone who sells a technical solution, it's perhaps no surprise that Jude has faith in filtering. "The great thing about the technology is that it allows parents to make the determination of what they want their kids to be able to do and not to do," he says. "And isn't that what we're supposed to be doing in this country?"