Bush Doctrine Quotes

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

When the Pentagon feels free and even gleeful about killing anybody and Everybody who gets in the way of their vicious crusade for oil, the public soul of this country has changed forever, and professional sports is only a serenade for the death of the American dream. Mahalo.

in moments of crisis, people are willing to hand over a great deal of power to anyone who claims to have a magic cure—whether the crisis is a financial meltdown or, as the Bush administration would later show, a terrorist attack.

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.

Summer has never been the same since the 2000 Presidential Election, when we still seemed to be a prosperous nation at peace with the world, more or less. Two summers later we were a dead-broke nation at war with all but three or four countries in the world, and three of those don't count. Spain and Italy were flummoxed and and England has allowed itself to be taken over by and stigmatized by some corrupt little shyster who enjoys his slimy role as a pimp and a prostitute all at once--selling a once-proud nation of independent-thinking people down the river and into a deadly swamp of slavery to the pimps who love Jesus and George Bush and the war-crazed U.S. Pentagon.

I see the Bush Doctrine as an American-style “enabling act,” giving dictatorial powers to any sitting president.

Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Nixon stabbed his Enemies in the back, but Clinton did it to his Friends. His lust to inflict Punishment surpassed even Nixon’s, and he put more people in prison than Caligula. He had his own brother locked up & he refused to pardon his old friend Webb Hubbell.… Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster; Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

(According to The New York Times, “the top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns.” The Bush administration, in turn, increased the amount spent on contractors by roughly $200 billion between 2000 and 2006.)

The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.

for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.

This Bush Doctrine stands today and is assumed by President Obama to be legitimate as he carries out a secret drone war worldwide with no congressional input or oversight.

We are now being coerced to accept and believe that a new political-cum-religious doctrine has arisen, namely that 'there is but one political god, George Bush, and Tony Blair is his prophet

February is always a bad month for TV sports. Football is gone, basketball is plodding along in the annual midseason doldrums, and baseball is not even mentioned. It is a good time for building fires, reading books, watching movies, and cranking up random sex orgies with the neighbors.

Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972—and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake.

The Bush Doctrine was created to justify ongoing and future interventions on the basis of America’s “moral” responsibility since becoming the only superpower left standing. More succinctly, the Bush Doctrine is about pursuing a world empire.

Associated with the Bush Doctrine is preemptive war, the assassination of Americans and foreigners without due process, secret military prisons, extraordinary rendition, and torture. How anyone can argue that this makes America safer and more respected is beyond me. Common sense should tell us that such actions are a sure way to create more enemies. Resentment toward the US grows with each new attack. Resentment also grows with the sweep of the US military, and US support of dictators and insurgents, around the world.

The Bush Doctrine defends the US killing a supposed enemy 6,000 miles away who has never attacked and cannot attack America. Those who struggle and sacrifice to expel foreign invaders from their homeland are the monsters that must be stopped according to the logic of Presidents Bush and Obama, who take their cues from the neoconservatives.

The Bush Doctrine has continued in force and expanded in application under President Obama. If the Bush Doctrine is not reversed, it will become a major contributing factor one day to a financial crisis associated with a national bankruptcy. It will then invite all the peoples of the many countries that we have offended with our aggressive interventions to pile on big time. Retaliation will be vicious. All Americans will be blamed and “punished” even though the tragic mess was orchestrated by the few who manipulated foreign policy for their own benefit. The greatest fault of the American people has been that their complacency prevented effective resistance to the government overstepping its bounds and acting in a lawless manner.

Feit is dat de ten uitvoerlegging van de Truman doctrine de Verenigde Staten heeft verheven, in een eerste fase, tijdens de Koude Oorlog, tot de politie van West-Europa, in een tweede fase, na de Val van de Muur, tot de politie van de hele wereld, - een politie die aan iedere parlementaire controle ontsnapt. Is dit dan de global power waar George W. Bush en zijn denktanks zo fier over waren?

That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution—a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

A network of right-wing think tanks seized on Friedman’s proposal and descended on the city after the storm. The administration of George W. Bush backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert New Orleans schools into “charter schools,” publicly funded institutions run by private entities according to their own rules. Charter schools are deeply polarizing in the United States, and nowhere more than in New Orleans, where they are seen by many African-American parents as a way of reversing the gains of the civil rights movement, which guaranteed all children the same standard of education. For Milton Friedman, however, the entire concept of a state-run school system reeked of socialism.

But I have a flash of Good News from the Police Atrocity front, which is heating up in Denver.… Stand back! Good News is rare in the Criminal Justice System, but every once in a while you find it, and this is one of those times. To wit: the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has formally entered the Appeals trial of young Lisl Auman—the girl who remains locked up in a cell at the Colorado State Prison for the Rest of Her Life with No Possibility of Parole for a bogus crime she was never even Accused of committing. She is a living victim of a cold-blooded political trial that will cast a long shadow on Denver for many years to come. Lisl is the only person ever convicted in the United States for Felony Murder who was in police custody when the crime happened.

I still suffer hate and pain in my heart every time I see the word "Duke" on a TV screen, and that rotten Thing happened nine years ago when that Swine Christian Laettner hit that impossible last-second shot against Kentucky. I still have a Memory Block about it -- but as I recall it was in the East Regional final that is still known as "the Best basketball game ever played." Geez, it Was and remains the Worst Shock I've experienced in my Life.

Moses saw the burning burn, yet the bush was not consumed. He turned aside at the wonder of it all, and in doing so, he came into the presence of God. It changed him forever! Why do we not see changes like this in every new believer? I am convinced it is our fault—we do not expect anything, and often become quite uncomfortable when someone we would lead to Christ expresses emotion. So we carefully prepare tracts that explain perfectly the doctrine, but we make no preparation for what might happen if the person should, God forbid, actually be overwhelmed by the spirit. We do not act like we even believe much has happened, yet the Bible says the angels in heaven rejoice over one sinner finding his way back.

Pioneered in Iraq, for-profit relief and reconstruction has already become the new global paradigm, regardless of whether the original destruction occurred from a preemptive war, such as Israel’s 2006 attack on Lebanon, or a hurricane. With resource scarcity and climate change providing a steadily increasing flow of new disasters, responding to emergencies is simply too hot an emerging market to be left to the nonprofits—why should UNICEF rebuild schools when it can be done by Bechtel, one of the largest engineering firms in the U.S.? Why put displaced people from Mississippi in subsidized empty apartments when they can be housed on Carnival cruise ships? Why deploy UN peacekeepers to Darfur when private security companies like Blackwater are looking for new clients? And that is the post-September 11 difference: before, wars and disasters provided opportunities for a narrow sector of the economy—the makers of fighter jets, for instance, or the construction companies that rebuilt bombed-out bridges. The primary economic role of wars, however, was as a means to open new markets that had been sealed off and to generate postwar peacetime booms. Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message. One distinct advantage of this postmodern approach is that in market terms, it cannot fail. As a market analyst remarked of a particularly good quarter for the earnings of the energy services company Halliburton, “Iraq was better than expected.”31 That was in October 2006, then the most violent month of the war on record, with 3,709 Iraqi civilian casualties.32 Still, few shareholders could fail to be impressed by a war that had generated $20 billion in revenues for this one company.33 Amid the weapons trade, the private soldiers, for-profit reconstruction and the homeland security industry, what has emerged as a result of the Bush administration’s particular brand of post-September 11 shock therapy is a fully articulated new economy. It was built in the Bush era, but it now exists quite apart from any one administration and will remain entrenched until the corporate supremacist ideology that underpins it is identified, isolated and challenged.

“I’m talking about greatness, about taking a lever to the world and moving it,” Larry Ellison said, walking the grounds of his new Woodside property in spring 2000 with his best friend, Steve Jobs. “I’m not talking about moral perfection. I’m talking about people who changed the world the most during their lifetime.” Jobs, who had returned to Apple three years earlier, enjoyed the conversational volleying with Larry about who was history’s greatest person. The Apple co-founder placed Leonardo da Vinci and Gandhi as his top choices, with Gandhi in the lead. Leonardo, a great artist and inventor, lived in violent times and was a designer of tanks, battlements, ramparts, and an assortment of other military tools and castle fortifications. Larry joked that had Leonardo not been gay, he would have been “a perfect fit for the Bush administration.” Jobs, who had studied in India, cited Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent revolution as an example of how it was possible to remain morally pure while aggressively pursuing change. Larry’s choice could not have been more different from Gandhi: the Corsican-born military leader Napoleon Bonaparte. “Napoleon overthrew kings and tyrants throughout Europe, created a system of free public schools, and wrote one set of laws that applied to everybody. Napoleon achieved liberal ends through conservative means,” Larry argued. " - The Billionaire and the Mechanic

for two thousand years, decided to repeat the anthropological process leading to divinization. The doctrine that comes “from being burned at the stake” may be seen as the exact opposite of the doctrine of the burning bush in which God appeared to Moses; it is the sacrificial pyre on which the victim was burnt

a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical narrative tracing the evolution of Mormon anti-black attitudes and related practices from the 1830s to the 1970s. Impressive was the array of primary documents Bush marshaled in support of his arguments. By contrast, Taggart’s relatively limited work proved wanting in its overly simplistic “Missouri Thesis” that Joseph Smith had impulsively implemented the priesthood ban in a futile effort to alleviate Mormon difficulties in that slave state. The thoroughness of Bush’s findings notwithstanding, I determined that Bush had not adequately dealt with the origins of the ban as it involved Joseph Smith. Specifically, I became convinced that Smith himself held certain racist, anti-black attitudes which, in turn, were given scriptural legitimacy through his canonical writings, specifically the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price. Bush, moreover, failed to acknowledge the crucial role played by the emergence of Mormon ethnic whiteness affirming the Saints’ self-perceived status as a divinely favored race. Conversely, Mormons viewed blacks as a marginalized race, the accursed descendants of Cain, Ham, and Caanan. Further validating African-American’s accursed status was their dark skin.

The doctrine that low taxes on the wealthy are the secret of prosperity has been tested again and again since the 1980s. It was tested in 1993, when Bill Clinton raised taxes, and conservatives predicted disaster; instead, he presided over a huge economic expansion. It was tested under George W. Bush, who cut taxes again, and whose supporters promised a boom; what he actually got was lackluster growth followed by financial collapse. It was tested in 2013, when Barack Obama allowed some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, while raising some other taxes to pay for Obamacare; the economy just kept chugging along. It was, finally, tested by Donald Trump, who passed a big tax cut in 2017 amid promises of another economic miracle; even as late as early 2019, the Trump tax cut was looking like a big fizzle. There were also tests at the state level.

The Supreme Court was beyond their constitutional power when they handed George W. Bush the victory in 2000 by ruling that if all the votes were counted in Florida, as that state’s supreme court had ordered, it would “cause irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush].” They were beyond their constitutional power every single time they struck down a law passed by Congress and signed by the president over the years. And most important, the Supreme Court was way beyond their constitutional authority every single time they created out of whole cloth new legal doctrines, such as “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, “privacy” in Roe v. Wade, or “corporations are people” in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. But in the fine tradition of John Marshall, today’s Supreme Court wants you to believe that they are the über-overlords of our nation. They can make George W. Bush president, without any appeal. They can make money into speech, they can turn corporations into people, and the rest of us have no say in it. And they’re wrong. It’s not what the Constitution says, and it’s not what most of our Founders said. Which raises the question: If the Supreme Court can’t decide what is and what isn’t constitutional, then what is its purpose? What’s it really supposed to be doing? The answer to that is laid out in the Constitution in plain black-and-white. It’s the first court where the nation goes for cases involving disputes about treaties, ambassadors, controversies between two or more states, between a state and citizen of another state, between citizens of different states, and between our country and foreign states. Read Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution—it’s all there. Not a word in there about “judicial supremacy” or “judicial review”—the supposed powers of the court to strike down (or write) laws by deciding what is and what isn’t constitutional. President Thomas Jefferson was pretty clear about that—as were most of the Founders—and the court didn’t start seriously deciding “constitutionality” until after all of them were dead. But back in the day, here’s what Jefferson had to say: The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves… When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity.177 Their elective capacity? That’s a fancy presidential-founder way of saying that the people can toss out on their butts any member of Congress or any president who behaves in a way that’s unconstitutional. The ultimate remedy is with the people—it’s the ballot box. If we don’t like the laws being passed, then we elect new legislators and a new president. It’s pretty simple.

Unflinching creeds and consuming worldviews could lead to catastrophe, for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts. He

irritatingly moralistic. Democratic globalism sees as the engine of history not the will to power but the will to freedom. And while it has been attacked as a dreamy, idealistic innovation, its inspiration comes from the Truman Doctrine of 1947, the Kennedy inaugural of 1961, and Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of 1983. They all sought to recast a struggle for power between two geopolitical titans into a struggle between freedom and unfreedom, and yes, good and evil. Which is why the Truman Doctrine was heavily criticized by realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan—and Reagan was vilified by the entire foreign policy establishment for the sin of ideologizing the Cold War by injecting a moral overlay. That was then. Today, post-9/11, we find ourselves in a similar existential struggle but with a different enemy: not Soviet communism, but Arab-Islamic totalitarianism, both secular and religious. Bush and Blair are similarly attacked for naïvely and crudely casting this struggle as one of freedom versus unfreedom, good versus evil. Now, given the way not just freedom but human decency were suppressed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major battles of this new war, you would have to give Bush and Blair’s moral claims the decided advantage of being obviously true. Nonetheless, something can be true and still be dangerous. Many people are deeply uneasy with the Bush-Blair doctrine—many conservatives in particular. When Blair declares in his address to Congress: “The spread of freedom is … our last line of defense and our first line of attack,” they see a dangerously expansive, aggressively utopian foreign policy. In short, they see Woodrow Wilson. Now, to a conservative, Woodrow Wilson is fightin’ words. Yes, this vision is expansive and perhaps utopian. But it ain’t Wilsonian. Wilson envisioned the spread of democratic values through as-yet-to-be invented international institutions. He could be forgiven for that. In 1918, there was no way to know how utterly corrupt and useless those international institutions would turn out to be. Eight decades of bitter experience later—with Libya chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights—there is no way not to know. Democratic globalism is not Wilsonian. Its attractiveness is precisely that it shares realism’s insights about the centrality of power. Its attractiveness is precisely that it has appropriate contempt for the fictional legalisms of liberal internationalism. Moreover, democratic globalism is an improvement over realism. What it can teach realism is that the spread of democracy is not just an end but a means, an indispensable means for securing American interests. The reason is simple. Democracies are inherently more friendly to the United States, less belligerent to their neighbors and generally more inclined to peace. Realists are right that to protect your interests you often have to go around the world bashing bad guys over the head. But that technique, no matter how satisfying, has its limits. At some point, you have to implant something, something organic and self-developing. And that something is democracy. But where? V. DEMOCRATIC REALISM The danger of democratic globalism is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere. It must learn to say no. And indeed, it does say no. But when it says no to Liberia, or Congo, or Burma, or countenances alliances with authoritarian rulers in places like Pakistan

by the fact of his own election, that audacity does not appear to challenge the system of power which has brought the nation an endless war, bankruptcy, recession, and high unemployment. Change aplenty and all feeding the drift toward the system described in the pages that follow. July 2009 Preface As a preliminary I want to emphasize certain aspects of the approach taken in this volume in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. Although the concept of totalitarianism is central to what follows, my thesis is not that the current American political system is an inspired replica of Nazi Germany’s or George W. Bush of Hitler.1 References to Hitler’s Germany are introduced to remind the reader of the benchmarks in a system of power that was invasive abroad, justified preemptive war as a matter of official doctrine, and repressed all opposition at home—a system that was cruel and racist in principle and practice, deeply ideological, and openly bent on world domination. Those benchmarks are introduced to illuminate tendencies

From the outset, it was clear to me that Boot’s dictum was wishful thinking. Already the Bush doctrine had made a vicious mockery of it. Iraq, since the American-led invasion, had descended into a lawless sectarian hell, and democracy had brought to power, with Nour Al-Maliki, a Tehran lackey determined to create a Shia theocracy in Iran’s image. The democratic government of “liberated” Afghanistan had proved itself a corrupt bunch of clansmen. Its writ, a decade after that country’s “liberation,” barely ran beyond the capital, Kabul, and even that city could not, in any meaningful sense, be said to be under full control of the central government. From the ashes and slaughter had emerged a sole negotiating partner who offered Washington any hope of a more stable future and a safe exit from the mire: the Taliban, against whom America had gone to war in the first place.

The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been Defense Secretary during the first Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ That 1992 policy paper was ordered buried by Bush. It became far too hot, after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made official as U.S. National Security Strategy, the Bush Doctrine, in September 2002. Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-Cold War era. They declared that the U.S. ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, where they proposed Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, and effect total control of cyberspace, as well as to develop biological weapons, ‘that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, played the part of the free-spending venture capitalist of that same heady era. Whereas in the nineties the goal was to develop the killer application, the “next new new thing,” and sell it to Microsoft or Oracle, now it was to come up with a new “search and nail” terrorist-catching technology and sell it to the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon.

The Bush Doctrine is democratic imperialism. This will bleed, bankrupt and isolate this republic. This overthrows the wisdom of the Founding Fathers about what America should be all about.

Mormon Thought, the first appearing in 1969 and the second in 1973. In his 1969 essay “A Commentary on Steven G. Taggart’s Mormonism’s Negro Policy: Social and Historical Origins,” Bush excoriated Taggart for his limited, incomplete research.7 Bush systematically dismantled Taggart’s central thesis that Joseph Smith initiated black priesthood denial in response to Latter-day Saint difficulties in Missouri. Bush supported his refutation with extensive documentation.8 Bush further developed his arguments in a second in-depth Dialogue article entitled “Mormonism’s Negro Doctrine: An Historical Overview” published in 1973. His fifty-seven page essay containing some 219 footnotes constituted by far the most comprehensive examination of Mormon racial policy up to that time.9 Bush’s essay drew heavily from a four-hundred-page compendium of primary and secondary documents compiled over some ten years. Covering the period from the 1830s to the 1970s, Bush’s “Compilation on the Negro in Mormonism” contains First Presidency minutes, Quorum of the Twelve meeting minutes, and other General Authority interviews and writings.10 Bush’s carefully written text found minimal evidence to support the LDS Church’s official position that the priesthood ban resulted from divine revelation—thus contradicting a major justification for its existence. Seeking to undermine its legitimacy and thus prod the Church toward change, Bush summarily dismissed the ban as the unfortunate product of socio-historical forces present in the larger nineteenth century American society. The scholarly studies of Stephen Taggart and especially Lester E. Bush Jr. greatly influenced my own work, which commenced as

a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Davis.11 After carefully weighing the contrasting arguments of Taggart and Bush, I determined that Bush made by far the more convincing case—specifically his central thesis that the priesthood ban resulted from socio-economic prejudices endemic in American society at large. Such anti-black attitudes as embraced by Brigham Young were incorporated as policy, which evolved into doctrine—all of which occurred following the death of Joseph Smith.12 Striking was the breadth of Bush’s historical

The idea of a doctrineless Christianity stands at odds with the words of Christ, who revealed himself to the apostles in explicitly doctrinal terms. Jesus revealed himself in truth claims. He identified himself as the Son of Man and demonstrated his deity, even referring to himself as “I am” repeatedly in the gospel of John—bearing the name God had given himself from the burning bush as he spoke to Moses (Ex. 3:13–16). A doctrineless Christianity also stands in contradiction with what Christ commissioned his apostles to do—to make disciples of all nations and to teach them to obey all that Christ commanded (Matt. 28:18–20). This command requires doctrine.

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together - that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course that were on, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason that so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident that they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it. This may also partially explain why so many Bush supporters are Christian end-timers. It’s not just that they need to believe that there is an escape hatch from the world they are creating, its that the rapture is a parable for what they are building down here – a system that invites destruction and disaster then swoops in with private helicopters and airlifts them and their friends to divine safety.