If you have time to read a very cathartic autopsy article on the Bush regime, please access the following link. It is called "The Bushies Stole Us Blind … So, How’d You Like Your Beer?" By David Michael Green, at AlterNet Jan. 19, 2009.

Along with unleashing an enviably brilliant and scathing wit, Mr. Green asserts that Americans don’t appreciate the true malice of the Bush administration, even now. They dismiss it as having been grossly incompetent. Green contends that is like minimizing "first degree murder to involuntary manslaughter." Bush’s malice was premeditated. Evil. Profoundly and devastatingly evil!

I have distilled this list of favorite insights from Mr. Green’s article:

Instead, this was an American Stalin, seeking to use military power for purposes of overrunning and raping other countries. Instead, this was an American Mugabe, seeking to steal power by any means, in order to plunder the wealth of his own country per the interests of a narrow band of cronies.

The mission of this ideology was in fact to diminish, if not impoverish, the vast bulk of these citizens so that the already massively wealthy among them could become obscenely wealthy.


… the plutocrats behind Reaganism-Bushism saw a filthy aberration to the natural order of master and slave that had long existed in human history. … through a process of class warfare. That meant that labor unions had to go, along with workplace protections, good wages, decent benefits, government protections and a far-too-moderate average CEO-to-lowest-paid-worker salary ratio on the order of 50-to-1, replaced instead by something closer to 500-to-1.

And, where Washington was concerned, that meant that government was to become a vehicle to serve not the 300 million, but rather the 300 families at the top, who already owned the most but craved ever, ever more. It was a cash cow that could provide enormous riches to buccaneers who make the Somali pirates look like Campfire Girls in comparison.

Of course, a movement representing one-half of 1 percent of the American public is never going to win elections as such … First, they had to lie about their agenda. Second, they had to enlist others as unwitting agents in their crime. Third, they had to steal elections.

Then, by pretending to give two shits about religious piety or national security threats, the kleptocratic junta could enlist the shock troops of the Religious Right and enough lazy and selfish voters necessary to seize power through elections …

What drives people to embrace stupidity, aggression, recklessness, destruction and contemptuousness as national policy, especially when they have other choices?

It’s been long said of George W. Bush that he wins elections because he seems like the kind of guy voters would be most comfortable having a beer with. That says a lot — an unfortunate, awful lot — about us fearful Americans. How frightened and insecure do you have to be, after all, to deliberately choose mediocrity for your government –

But something went desperately wrong — beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s and culminating with this reign of the American Caligula.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University.