George W. Bush returns to the news with a tad too much honesty, lifting a veil on Washington’s dirtiest open secret: the Biden Democrats have become the Bush Republicans
Today’s Biden is Bush, a helpless, terrified passenger dragged on a political journey beyond his comprehension, signing his name whenever told to appalling policies, like a child emperor or King George in the porphyria years. It’s obvious, but no one will bring it up, for the usual reason, i.e. because Trump.
George W. Bush returned to the news last week. The man who once said, “Our enemies… never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we,” coughed up a gem of accidental truth about Ukraine. In the midst of blasting Vladimir Putin for suppressing dissent, he said:
The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.
Although Bush in recent years has been regularly tongue-bathed by blue-party acolytes for speaking against Trump, with Katie Hill once going so far as to admit to tears as she pondered “how much better we’d all feel if Bush were president today,” press priests from CNN to NBC to The Guardian last weektossed him back overboard over his Ukraine miss. Stephen Colbert even “waxed nostalgic,” remembering the time before his current apple-polishing period, when he was an actual satirist under Bush: “I made so much fun of him, and he gave me so many reasons to do that.”
Propaganda demands Bush take a dive now. Not only did his recent honesty malfunction complicate messaging about the unique iniquity of Russian aggression, he’s a living reminder of the uncomfortable truth that he and Joe Biden have essentially merged to become the same president.
Biden is just a less likable, more deranged version of Dubya, a political potted plant behind which authoritarians rule by witch hunt and moral mania, with Joe floating on a somehow even fatter cloud of media protection than Bush enjoyed after 9/11. Today’s Biden is Bush, a helpless, terrified passenger dragged on a political journey beyond his comprehension, signing his name whenever told to appalling policies, like a child emperor or King George in the porphyria years. It’s obvious, but no one will bring it up, for the usual reason, i.e. because Trump. The major difference is that while
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And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them.
Oh my God. It happened. I can’t believe it really happened.
During a speech in Dallas at Southern Methodist University’s George W Bush Presidential Center on Wednesday, the man himself, George W Bush, did the best thing ever. I am pretty sure it is the single best thing that has ever happened. I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that.
While criticizing Russia for having rigged elections and shutting out political opposition (which would already be hilarious coming from any American in general and Bush in particular), the 43rd president made the following comment:
“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine.”
And then it got even better. After correcting himself with a nervous chuckle, Bush broke the tension in the empire-loyal crowd with the words, “Iraq too. Anyway.” He then quipped that he is 75 years old, leaning harder on his “Aw shucks gee willikers I’m such a goofball” persona than he ever has in his entire life.
And Bush’s audience laughed. They thought it was great. A president who launched an illegal invasion that killed upwards of a million people (probably way upwards) openly confessing to doing what every news outlet in the western world has spent the last three months shrieking its lungs out about Putin doing was hilarious to them.
There are not enough shoes in the universe to respond to this correctly.
As comedian John Fugelsang put it, “George W. Bush didn’t do a Freudian slip. He did a Freudian Confession.”
One of the many, many interesting things about this occurrence is the likelihood that Bush’s words tumbled out in the way they did because he’s either heard a lot of criticisms of his invasion or has been thinking a lot about them; a familiar neural pathway would explain why his brain chose the exact worst word he could possibly swap out for “Ukraine” in that moment. This would be a small light in the darkness for we ordinary folk who oppose war and love peace, because it suggests that even the worst empire managers cannot fully insulate themselves from our criticisms.
The bullshit doesn’t get any more brightly illuminated than this, folks. All that spin and narrative management they’ve been pouring into the US proxy war in Ukraine, and Bush undoes it all with the Bushism to end all Bushisms.
While the western political/media class constantly rends its garments over “disinformation” about the Ukraine war even as US officials openly admit they’ve been using the media to circulate disinformation about that same war, and even as the Biden administration imprisons and persecutes a journalist for exposing US war crimes, we get a square admission that the US is no better than Russia and that the only thing obscuring this is the fact that we are all swimming in a sea of disinformation and propaganda provided by that same political/media class.
And this admission comes not from any low-level empire lackey, but from the man himself. The guy. The man whose name alone serves as a one-word debunk of every claim made about how uniquely nefarious Vladimir Putin is on the world stage and how uniquely depraved is his invasion of Ukraine.
If you really look at what just happened, really truly ingest it, this one incident just by itself is enough to show you that we are swimming in a sea of lies designed to give us an upside-down and ass-backwards perspective of what’s going on in the world. If Bush himself can’t always tell the difference between the invasion of Iraq and the invasion of Ukraine, then this means our news media and our politicians are lying to us constantly. They lied to us through 2002 and 2003, and they never stopped lying, and they are lying now in the year 2022.
The entire mainstream worldview is a perceptual distortion filter which obscures the public understanding of world events so severely that Bush has been not just forgiven for his crimes but actively rehabilitated in the public eye, while the enemies of the United States are continuously compared to Adolf Hitler and condemned throughout the US-dominated world.
In reality the US is the single most tyrannical and destructive government on this planet, and it is only because the public is fed a nonstop deluge of propaganda that this isn’t universally obvious. Even the worst empire managers know deep down that this is true, and, in their less guarded moments, sometimes the truth slips out.
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As he closed his essay Hayek confessed that since the word liberal had been corrupted, thanks to the French Revolution and other forces, by “overrationalis[m], nationalis[m]” and socialis[m],” it had ceased to a good label for his political outlook, which he shared with Tocqueville and Acton: “What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition. [Emphasis added.]
Who among true liberal advocates of individual liberty and free social evolution — aka libertarians — would deny the truth of that observation?
Hayek had European conservatism in mind when he wrote his essay, and for years, American conservatives, who still had affection for true liberalism, hastened to point this out. As Hayek wrote:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense.
Later in his essay, he elaborated that “in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions. To the liberal they are valuable not mainly because they are long established or because they are American but because they correspond to the ideals which he cherishes.”
But he noted that “This already existing confusion [over labels] was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character.” The confusion was compounded, Hayek wrote, when socialists began to call themselves liberals.
Many still suffer from this confusion today. But change has been afoot because the illiberals of the left and right increasingly want no part of true liberalism or the label — and in a way, that’s good. Those on the left who call themselves progressives or socialists don’t like the label liberal (or neo-liberal) because they associate it with the current permanent bipartisan prowar regime beholden to special corporate interests (so we liberals still have work to do), and virtually all conservatives eschew the label because they don’t want to be mistaken for libertarians. That’s also good.
So Hayek’s essay has new relevance for America. Would Hayek have been surprised? He would have distinguished national conservatism from neoconservatism because of the latter’s cosmopolitanism. But how could he embrace as bonafide allies people who view imperialist war as a way to create “national greatness” and social solidarity, as the neocons do? Hayek would have agreed with Abraham Bishop who said in 1800 that “a nation which makes greatness its polestar can never be free; beneath national greatness sink individual greatness, honor, wealth and freedom.”
Let’s look at Hayek’s problem with conservatism. For him, the “decisive objection” is that “by its nature,” conservatism can do no more than slow down the change that progressives have initiated. That’s not good enough: “What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move.” He acknowledged that although the liberal’s differences with the “collectivist radical” are greater than his differences with the conservative, the latter “generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time.” Thus “the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.”
On episode #2129 (yes, I’ve been at this that long) of the Tom Woods Show, released just yesterday, I discuss a topic that’s on the minds of lots of decent people: the forthcoming “pandemic treaty” from the World Health Organization (WHO).
This can’t be good.
The current director general of the WHO placed the treaty in the content of strengthening his organization “as the leading and directing authority on global health, at the center of the global health architecture.” Well, we certainly don’t want that.
He went on: “We all want a world in which science triumphs over misinformation; solidarity triumphs over division; and equity is a reality, not an aspiration.” We now know that “science” means the latest b.s. from people like him, and “misinformation” is when people like you and me try to correct it. “Solidarity” means socialism, and “equity” means socialism.
And then this: “We are one world, we have one health, we are one WHO.”
Creepy.
We can only speculate right now on what this new pandemic plan might contain, but we definitely have plenty to go on, and we know more than enough to conclude that we don’t want it.
I spend some time, too, talking about the issue of whether a treaty can trump the Constitution, which is what these creeps will try to claim.
Here’s the link, and while you’re there, click one of the links to subscribe to the Tom Woods Show so you get content like this delivered automatically to your device for free every weekday:
In celebration of part 4/4 of “The Adventures of Pinocchio and Free Speech” compilation series (available in audio-only format on the JBP Podcast), we decided to revisit a classic lecture from Dr. Peterson’s 2015 Maps of Meaning series discussing the 1940 Disney classic Pinocchio.
The point I am trying to make is that we human beings face problems, serious ones. Several can mean the end of life as we know it. The more serious ones can eventuate in the death of all of us, children and grandchildren included. Do we really want to risk this? Are we really going to fritter our way out of saving ourselves by fighting each other?
How will human life on the third rock from the sun end? A comet, or a bug, or nuclear war, or alien creatures might come and kick us all in the posterior.
Actually, probably, well, possibly, one of these millions of years, all life will cease on our planet, except for very hardy micro-organisms. What are the candidates to do the evil deed?
First up in the batter’s box is some sort of super-duper bug that will make Covid look like a walk in the park. Second in the batting order will be a nuclear war between human beings. In third place? A gigantic comet will come crashing down upon us, obliterating the entire planet. That one will challenge even our fellow micro-organism creatures. In the clean-up position? Who knows. Maybe advanced powerful alien creatures from the planet Zorgon who want to eat us all.
But whatever is this threat, the danger will be enhanced by human error. What kind of mistake are we making? We are fighting each other. Mary Tyler Moore used to say that “love is all around us.” We can now opine, more accurately, unfortunately, that “hostility is all around us.” Wars abound; there are more of them than you can shake a stick at. Violent crime is seemingly ever erupting.
What is the source of all of this? The sociobiological explanation might well be the most accurate: we humans needed a nasty streak in order to fight off the saber tooth lions and their brethren of field and stream when all we had was sticks and rocks at our disposal. But the residue of such behavior is still with us, when it is no longer needed; when it is positively harmful to our well-being. Any 90-pound weakling of our species with the proper equipment can nowadays make minced meat of the most ferocious mega fauna now bestriding the earth or swimming around in its waters. And this goes as well for dinosaurs should they ever pop up again, several movies to the contrary notwithstanding.
The point I am trying to make is that we human beings face problems, serious ones. Several can mean the end of life as we know it. The more serious ones can eventuate in the death of all of us, children and grandchildren included. Do we really want to risk this? Are we really going to fritter our way out of saving ourselves by fighting each other? Can we not resolve to cease and desist from what in effect might possibly become species annihilation? If not, we will be committing mass suicide.
The first step, it seems to me, is to somehow orchestrate a cease fire and then a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine. Part and parcel of this would be that the former should obligate itself not to topple the government of the latter, nor criminalize any of its leaders; in response, the latter should give up all efforts to join NATO. That organization should be disbanded in any peace treaty, not further expanded in an eastward direction. Let’s say no to the entrance of Finland and Sweden.
There are equally serious conflagrations continually occurring in Africa. A large part of this emanates from the fact that Europeans all too often set up national boundaries that totally ignored ethnicity. This is a recipe for disaster. Secession might well be the best way out of this morass. But that will take understanding and willingness to see the other side’s view that unhappily is in all too short supply. Why should it be alright for the thirteen colonies to secede from England, but not, say, for California or Texas, to depart from the United States? A peaceful secession would also dampen down the threat of war in Spain.
Is this too much to ask from our fellow humans? Probably it is, given our history of murdering each other. But, happily, we can now at least ask. Maybe, pray for peace and good will toward each other. As for those aliens, why not reserve our nastiness for them?
From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying. Watch our original video.
Glenn Greenwald
Screen shot from our new original video about Nicolle Wallace, “The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation” (credit: Matt Orfalea)
The most blatant and shameless liars from the first term of the Bush/Cheney administration have, revealingly, enjoyed great success in media and journalism. That is because serial deceit is not a liability for a thriving career in corporate journalism but rather a vital asset — provided that the lies are in service of ruling class policies. Tawdry propagandists who helped drive post-9/11 America into a bottomless pit of lies and self-destruction have become the most highly-paid and beloved stars of liberal media. They include:
Former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum of The Atlantic and CNN;
Bush/Cheney CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden of CNN;
Ubiquitous amoral neocon warmonger Bill Kristol of MSNBC and various #NeverTrump groups;
Pro-war Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough, now a multi-million host of MSNBC’s flagship morning show and anchor of its corporate brand; and,
Rep. Liz Cheney, long-time vocal supporter of her father and now a literal “hero” to American media liberals.
But few Bush-era propagandists have thrived more, made more money, and developed a more devoted and swooning liberal fan base than the official Communications Director of the Bush/Cheney White House and 2004 Bush/Cheney-reelection campaign, Nicolle Wallace. Having catapulted from her work as Jeb Bush’s Press Secretary to the White House to senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign (working for her close friend, Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt, who recently performed one of the most public and sustained nervous breakdowns in the history of the internet), Wallace was always beloved by the DC press corps.
In 2005, when she was named Bush White House Communications Director, The New York Times lavished her with praise, claiming that she “comes from a different mold than the small band of Texans who carry out the White House press policy” and admiringly noted that “she was once fired for being too nice to reporters.” She endeared herself further to corporate journalists by repeatedly sabotaging the McCain campaign from which she was collecting a paycheck, leaking negative stories about McCain and his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (whose selection as Vice Presidential candidate was driven primarily by liberal icons Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt).
Freedom of speech won this Wednesday after the Biden Administration suspended its controversial Disinformation Board. Former disinformation tzar Nina Jankowicz announced her departure today, citing an uncertain future, and, of course, disinformation. “It is deeply disappointing that mischaracterizations of the Board became a distraction from the Department’s vital work, and indeed, along with recent events globally and nationally, embodies why it is necessary. “I maintain my commitment to building awareness of disinformation’s threats and trust the Department will do the same,“ Jankowicz said.
Jankowicz has a long history of spreading false news and gaslighting the public to believe that the Bidens are not a completely corrupt family. She firmly denied the existence of Hunter’s laptop, and perhaps it is no coincidence that the contents of that laptop are slowly being leaked to the public.
Although this Orwellian plan has been temporarily suspended, censorship will continue discreetly.
Americans have every right to be steamed over the cynical use of borders kept open to create a permanent Democratic majority. Among the prices being paid for this outrageous, unconstitutional action are the flooding of our country with fentanyl (much of it originating in China) and Central American criminal gangs. The attempt of Biden and his administration and their media drones to link these justified complaints to psychopathic mass murderers (mind you, only the white racist not the black racist ones) has left me livid with rage.
In an exercise in guilt by nonassociation, Associated Press reporter David Bauder explains in what pretends to be a balanced news story that there is widespread, “right-wing” hate behind the Buffalo shooting. This misfortune, he says, is related to Joe Biden’s decision to open the southern U.S. border to those who may wish to join us in this country. Lots of unkind Americans have questioned allowing millions of illegal aliens to enter the United States and providing them with de facto amnesty, together with government-financed transportation to the interior of the country. Tens of millions of Americans, apparently quite irrationally, view these steps as an attempt to create a permanent Democratic electoral majority.
For Bauder, such speculation is evidence of widespread bigotry, and he cites Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism about a “mainstream view,” which “baselessly suggests that Democrats are encouraging immigration from Latin America so that like-minded potential voters replace ‘traditional’ Americans.”
Many of those who hold such apparently baseless suspicions also adhere to a “great replacement conspiracy theory,” which argues a concerted effort is underway by American elites to use immigration to replace a predominantly white population with a nonwhite one. The chant by Charlottesville demonstrators in 2017 that white Americans would not be replaced was only the tip of a racist iceberg; and Bauder and Pitcavage link this war against being “replaced” to among others Fox News host Tucker Carlson and U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Both have accused Biden and the Democrats of using illegal immigration to establish a permanent Democratic majority. Stefanik, although depicted as a very centrist Republican, delivered a supposedly frightening tirade last year about how “radical Democrats” were engaged in a “permanent election insurrection” by granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants. Bauder and Pitcavage associate such rhetoric not only with the Buffalo shooting but also with white racist violence in Norway, New Zealand, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018.
Equally dangerous, it would seem, was the bookLe Grand Remplacement published by the gay French deconstructionist Renaud Camus in 2011. According to Camus, “Europe was being invaded by Black and brown immigrants from Africa;” and this was creating a cultural and political crisis. Camus, whom we are led to believe published something comparable to the pro-Nazi Turner Diaries, allegedly provided a theoretical foundation for the recent disturbing manifestations of white supremacy ideology that Bauder and Pittcavage see all around us.
Except for the following facts, that Camus published Le Grand Remplacement, that Stefanik did warn (and quite properly so) against the use of illegal immigration as a Democratic electoral tool, and that the Buffalo killer hated blacks, there is nothing in Bauder’s partisan propaganda that is even vaguely true.
Americans have every right to be steamed over the cynical use of borders kept open to create a permanent Democratic majority. Among the prices being paid for this outrageous, unconstitutional action are the flooding of our country with fentanyl (much of it originating in China) and Central American criminal gangs. The attempt of Biden and his administration and their media drones to link these justified complaints to psychopathic mass murderers (mind you, only the white racist not the black racist ones) has left me livid with rage.
Moreover, Camus’ book, which I have actually read, is not a racist tract but a careful examination of the implications of the demographic changes that France is now undergoing. A detailed literature on the correlation between increased crime and increased African immigration into France already exists, as does printed evidence of the increasing Islamization of the country and the weakening of its Christian or traditional republican character. Pointing out such problems is hardly an invitation to murder. It is data that citizens should be able to weigh in making electoral decisions in a country that still describes itself as a constitutional democracy.
Vovan and Lexus, Russian pranksters known for trolling Western politicians, celebrities, and other public figures, revealed Tuesday that they had tricked George W. Bush into speaking with them. The former president played an instrumental role in the second wave of NATO’s eastward expansion, and the first Euromaidan crisis in Ukraine in 2004.
The United States didn’t keep its word to Moscow on NATO’s eastward expansion due to shifting circumstances, and the Bush administration always wanted to see Ukraine join the Western alliance, George W. Bush has revealed in a candid interview with Vovan and Lexus.
“I wanted [Russia] on the fringe of NATO, I wanted Ukraine into NATO”, Bush, who served as US president between 2001 and 2009, told the pranksters, who posed as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a portion of the interview that aired Thursday at a Russian educational forum.
“I thought for a while that Russia would be more cooperative. And then [Vladimir] Putin changed dramatically”, Bush said.
“I felt that Ukraine needed to be in the EU and in NATO”, he added.
“Listen, times change. Baker was the secretary of state with my dad, which was years ago, and so, uh, the United States must be flexible, adjusting to the times. And that’s why you’re trying to show our support for your country now”, he said.
Asked whether he agreed with the sentiment that the conflict in Ukraine was really a confrontation between the West and Russia, Bush answered curtly “Yeah”.
As for the argument that the US recognition of Kosovo in the 2000s on the grounds of its right to “self-determination” from Serbia paved the way for Russia’s recognition of the Donbass republics, Bush appeared briefly stumped, before assuring that “if you prevail, or when you prevail, a lot of these various issues are gonna be off the table”.
“Your mission is to destroy as many Russian troops as you can, and the question is, will you continue receiving the help you need. And I certainly hope so”, Bush said. He added that it was “very important” for the US to “continue to lead” in assisting Ukraine in achieving its goals.
George W. Bush presided over the second wave of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, welcoming Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia into the bloc in 2004. Between 1999 and 2020, 14 nations of the defunct Warsaw Pact, the former Yugoslavia, or the ex-USSR itself were absorbed by NATO. At its Bucharest summit in 2008, the alliance recognised Ukraine and Georgia’s “aspirations” toward eventual NATO membership.
Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov are a Russian comedy duo that has spent more than a decade trolling politicians, celebrities, royals, and other public figures around the world.
Their YouTube channel was taken down in March after they released videos of intimate conversations with British Defence chief Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel, revealing the true extent of covert UK military support for Ukraine, and the possibility of seizing Russian tycoons’ properties in London and handing them over to members of Ukraine’s political elite.
