The vile hypocrisy of George W. Bush

I consider myself a rational guy who approaches politics with critical thinking and a due understanding that there are few binary moral judgments involved. The Iran/Contra scandal has long been a topic which sends me into a Carrollian fantasy land of spite and unreason, but I'm going to try to talk about it and related matters for a little while without switching into that mode.

In one of the most galling displays I have witnessed in my years of political awareness, President Bush used a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding to call out Barack Obama. It was not the uncouth timing of the attack that offends me; I couldn't care any less about such propriety. It was the incomprehensible stupidity of the remark that set me off. Speaking before the Israeli legislature, Bush drew a parallel between Iran and Nazi Germany.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

The remark was intended as a swipe at Obama, who has taken fire for his suggestion that the United States should open diplomatic relations with governments that it does not approve of, such as Syria and Iran. The president's obvious dearth of understanding of how diplomacy works was effectively critiqued by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) on MSNBC's Hardball last night. Bush's elision of the distinction between communicating with another power and making concessions to that power is not what primarily concerns me. Biden is right to point out that the Bush administration has communicated with Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya and Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, and that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates advocates opening diplomatic relations with Iran. But Bush's hypocrisy is deeper and more disturbing than that.

The history of the president's family makes his Godwinning of his opponents particularly hapless. Bush's grandfather Prescott, the patriarch of the Bush political dynasty and generator of much of the family fortune, was a Nazi supporter and a financier of German militarization until 1942. Documents released from the National Archives in 2004 confirmed that Harriman Bank, a company under the direction of Prescott Bush, financed the German steel company Thyssen, an essential cog in the Nazi war machine. The company's owner fled Germany after turned against the Nazi regime, but Bush did not have a similar change of heart. He continued to finance the nationalized German steel operation until his assets were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942. The records of the incident were sealed in the National Archives and Bush later went on to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. George W. Bush should be one of the last people who would want to elicit images of Nazi tanks rolling across Europe.

On a similar note, there was long speculation about Prescott Bush's involvement in the so-called Business Plot, an attempt by Wall Street leaders to stage a military coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. Those rumors were also confirmed by documents released in 2007 from the National Archives. A group known as the American Liberty League planned to overthrow Roosevelt and approached Marine Gen. Smedley Butler to do the job. Butler had done a series of similar numbers in Latin America under President Woodrow Wilson, but those experiences had only made him a staunch critic of military/industrial juntas. He told Congress, and after a congressional committee conducted an investigation and confirmed the involvement of a number of America's leading corporate figures, the evidence was sealed in the National Archives. No one was prosecuted for treason.

Given the record of his own grandfather, the current President Bush would be well advised not to raise the charge of facilitating Nazi conquest. He still enjoys the wealth accumulated by Prescott Bush and owes his presidency to the dynasty that man established. It's astounding that, in the gelatinous mold of guilt-by-association that is American politics, more is not made of this connection. Besides Harper's Magazine the the BBC program Document, the only people who ever mention the elder Bush's financing of Nazi steelmakers are simple-minded Web denizens who insist that Bush is a modern-day reincarnation of Hitler. Plainly, George W. is not culpable for what his grandfather did in the decade before he was born, but the unbroken lineage from the Nazi financier to current president renders W.'s ostentation of moral superiority disgusting. I don't expect of him enough maturity to frankly discuss the source of the wealth and influence that made his ascension possible, but the least he could do is abstain from accusing others of moral equivalence with Nazi appeasement.

All of this says nothing of the Iran/Contra affair, which I mentioned above. The connection here is more direct: a number of George Herbert Walker Bush's colleagues in the Reagan administration were convicted of lying about weapons deals with the Iranian government (the same regime that Bush yesterday labeled the "world's leading state sponsor of terror") and used the funds to train right-wing death squads (the Contras) in Nicaragua. Apparently it was acceptable to negotiate with the Iranian regime 22 years ago, because W.'s father pardoned six of the I/C convicts when he succeeded Reagan as president. The weapons deal was justified, he wrote in part, because it had stabilized the political situation in the Middle East. This is true only in the sense that it helped Iran to balance the power of Saddam Hussein, then a U.S. ally (this shit gets crazier the farther down the rabbit hole you go, and it's all true). Many recurring Bush allies are close associates of the I/C pardon beneficiaries. Anyone familiar with the history of the neoconservative movement must recognize the hypocrisy of their cherry-picking moral indignation.

The preceding barrage of more-depressing-than-fiction shenanigans reveals the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Bush and his clique. And yet the most damning thing you'll find the media in the wake of the Bush speech is Biden's explanation of why diplomacy is a good idea. It is with rapt anticipation that I await the termination of Bush's tenure in office.