Nicholas F. Benton

The President’s Personal Demon

In the on-going saga of the Worst President in the History of the United States, two catastrophes of almost equal import in recent days showcased the fanatical, apocalyptic personal world view that informs George W. Bush.

The current deepening crisis in the Middle East and Bush’s veto yesterday of a stem cell bill passed by Congress belie an integrated, if frighteningly insane, internal mental map. It’s one that as maintained by an otherwise dysfunctional street corner bum with a bullhorn and sandwich sign proclaiming the imminent end of the world is relatively harmless. But as it instructs the most powerful leader in the world, it’s truly scary. People had better start to look at this more seriously.

First of all, with regard to the Middle East, no one is more responsible for the escalating violence in Lebanon and Israel than Bush. Contrary to decades of U.S. diplomacy dating almost from the establishment of the State of Israel after World War II, this administration has practiced five years of stubborn, malicious neglect.

Now, as thousands of innocent civilians on both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border are being killed, maimed, uprooted and rendered homeless, the Bush administration continues to sit on its hands, refuses to step in and insist on a cease-fire, and while standing on the sidelines, cheers on one side against the other.

What we are witnessing is not passive disregard by the Bush administration. It is the exercise of a kind of “passive aggression” that advances a vicious and dangerous agenda. This is another step in the Bush Armageddon policy.

There is no viable solution, no viable outcome, to approaching a conflict with the notion of promoting absolute and final victory of one side over the other. Not now, not in the world we live in today. If one’s only eventual solution to a conflict is to have one side blow the other to smithereens, to achieve the complete and total destruction and submission of the other side, then the only way that will be result is by the eventual escalation toward all-out, global conflagration.

This is an unnerving common sense observation of how U.S. foreign policy is now postured. It is not positioned to achieve global concord and mutual cooperation. The opposite is the case. It wants conflict and chaos, and wants it to escalate.

It does not want one side to vanquish the other. It wants escalation for escalation’s sake. At some point, as the mindless violence and destruction swells, a bright light is supposed to show up and descend from the heavens, the righteous raptured up to eternal glory while the rest of humanity is pitted in a thousand-year Armageddon that will end with a mighty cosmic intervention plunging most into the bowels of hell and introducing peace and concord once and for all.

It’s one thing for such smoky visionary images to be the subject of religious contemplation. It’s another for it to be the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy.

You think that’s a little extreme, even for President Bush? Then try to square it with the President’s completely fanatical rejection of the tenats of modern science and of the pleas for healing from countless human beings, present and future, that was exercised with his veto of the stem cell legislation yesterday.

If that doesn’t tell you just how nuts this man is, then you are every bit as much in denial as he is.

It is becoming clear that the hidden forces driving the policies of this administration come not in the form of some conspiracy of crafty, self-serving politicians led by Vice President Cheney or Karl Rove. It may be the case that the crowd hunkered around the Washington, D.C., water cooler known as the Project for a New American Century thinks it can ensure that its interests are served by the decisions of President Bush. They may, in turn, represent the powerful, invisible captains of corporate America, its international allied counterparts, and their vested interest in controlling the flow of the globe’s natural resources as they have for generations.

But the secret to George Bush is that, at some point, his door is closed to all these sorts and he sits alone with some very private, very special religious counselor. For Ronald Reagan, this personal Rasputin took the form of wife Nancy’s astrologer: dipping into the supernatural for practical decisions on running the country.

But that astrologer did not have a personal agenda, much less a hard and fast script for how the future will unfold.

Not so for President Bush’s secret friend. This particular demon tells our president exactly what he must do to bring about enough global chaos to present the almighty with his cue. As our president stares into this force’s dark eyes, all thoughts of human tragedy are dismissed. As he looks deeper, he seeks only a sign of that light he so desperately wants to descend.

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