Bush’s Base- The Pavlovian Dogs Of 911

I suppose it is stupid to still be amazed by George Bush’s utter uselessness at -well anything- but such is life, two separate reports paint a stark picture of a man who is-

• Thick as pig shit
• Utterly delusional

Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006…

Months before the Iraq invasion, President Bush apparently ignored a 2002 Oval Office briefing in which CIA director George Tenet provided the president with intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, according to former Clinton advisor and Salon columnist Sidney Blumenthal.

Reporting in Salon, Blumenthal writes that according to his sources, two former CIA officers,”Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.”

Blumenthal also adds that the intelligence from that day was left out of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which definitively stated that had WMD.

“The president had no interest in the intelligence,” a CIA officer disclosed. “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”

He’s also a vicious and cruel man but I suppose what is remarkable is how so many other people cover up for this pathetic human being and how many who actually like and still support him. It’s a bit like a mass case of battered spouse syndrome- but I love ‘im, he didn’t mean to do it, you don’t understand him, he’s lovely really! Some insight is gained in this piece about the psychologists who did the research to prove what many know by instinct, make people scared and they become more pliable. The report is from the staunchly Dem TNR so it wastes a lot of inches on making the findings partisan rather than a general lesson about demagogues but it is worth a read. They found that creating a subconscious awareness and hence anxiety and fear of ones death led people to seek conservative, simplistic, patriotic, father figure strong leader types- provoking ‘worldview defence’ as they called it.

“Man’s anxiety,” Becker wrote, “results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation.” Becker described how human beings defend themselves against this fundamental anxiety by constructing cultures that promise symbolic or literal immortality to those who live up to established standards. Among other things, we practice religions that promise immortality; produce children and works of art that we hope will outlive us; seek to submerge our own individuality in a larger, enduring community of race or nation; and look to heroic leaders not only to fend off death, but to endow us with the courage to defy it. We also react with hostility toward individuals and rival cultures that threaten to undermine the integrity of our own. 

It then turns out using ‘911′ creates the same fears, thus Bush’s use of it in virtually all speeches he ever gives. But essentially there has to be an intervening interval for the fear to become subconscious, such a distracting interval easily occurs in everyday life or is simply provided by an entertaining TV show-

When they would ask sub- jects to make judgments immediately following the mortality exercises, the exercises would have little effect. It was only when they interspersed a diversionary interval between the exercises and the judgments that the exercises had their full impact.

Freud had distinguished between “primary processes” of thought that were unconscious and irrational and “secondary processes” that were conscious and rational. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski reasoned that, when individuals first feel anxiety about their mortality, they respond consciously by invoking the usual psychological defenses– for instance, telling themselves that “it’s not me, now.” That allayed conscious anxiety, but, after the conscious anxiety about mortality had subsided, the thought remained unconscious and active and led people to erect worldview defenses. “The implicit knowledge of death rather than the current focal awareness is the motivating factor,” they wrote. “Once the problem of death is out of focal attention but while it is still highly accessible, terror management concerns are addressed by … bolstering faith in the worldview.” 

…because worldview defense increases hostility toward other races, religions, nations, and political systems, it helps explain the rage toward France and Germany that erupted prior to the Iraq war, as well as the recent spike in hostility toward illegal immigrants. Also central to worldview defense is the protection of tradition against social experimentation, of community values against individual prerogatives–as was evident in the Tucson experiment with the judges–and of religious dictates against secular norms. For many conservatives, this means opposition to abortion and gay marriage.

Psychological self defence though is possible-

In those cases where the experimenter urged care and deliberation, the psychologists concluded, subjects acted on a “rational” basis that reduced the influence of unconscious anxieties.

But that requires people willing to think critically and who are not enveloped in patriotic arrogance and sureness of their own beliefs. Which is sort of problematic when you come to conservatives whether they hide in the right or left or think ‘my country right or wrong’ is somehow an admirable position. However we are not in that position now, supporting and admiring Bush is not a political position, it is support and approval of a war criminal, it is accessory to the crime. Is gullible stupidity a valid mitigating defence for the millions who enabled Bush? Should we feel pity or disgust for such mentally impaired fools? And if the ‘Good Germans’ show no awareness or regret, how should we think of them, how can their fellow Americans live beside them, their genocidal instincts unconfronted? And their figurehead, he is not done yet and neither is the empire he so aptly represents.