El Presidente Jorge W. Bush has become something of an enigma in American politics. However did he manage to become such an unrelentingly bad President of the United States? What motivates him to pursue so many policies harmful to the United States of America? I've made comments here asking why our elites hate us and want to replace us. Noted evolutionary theorist Greg Cochran, responding specifically about Bush, advances some hypotheses to explain the destruction derby that is the Bush Presidency. First he points to one of Bush's quotes for a clue:
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." - George W. Bush
Then Greg lists various possible explanations for Bush's otherwise seemingly inexplicable behavior as President:
Maybe Bush is a time traveller who has seen a future where robots created by American industry took over the world and killed off most of humanity. Maybe he's trying to bring US industry down to Latin American levels of creativity and innovation in order to save the human race from extinction.
Maybe Bush wants a dumber society where he can feel superior to a larger fraction of the population.
Maybe Bush thinks he has to ruin US relations with the oil producing countries in order to force us off our dependence on oil for energy. Or maybe he secretly hates Israel and is trying to increase animosity toward the Israelis in the Middle East.
Bush's determination to drive up the national debt, let in massive numbers of low-performing ethnic groups, pursuit of a foreign policy in the Middle East that decreases US national security, and still other obviously bad policies all call out for an explanation. I gotta say on the effort to discredit representative government that he's having considerable success with me. Bush has played a big role in creating a legacy with the pre-schoolers that promises to make the electorate much more stupid in future decades. You might think the people who elected Bush are dumb. Well, future electorates are going to make our current voters look like geniuses in comparison..
Do you have any novel explanations for the Bush Presidency? Is he a poster boy for the brain damage caused by alcohol abuse? Did the devil send him among us to discredit Christians as a bunch of con artists and fools? Or is he just lazy?
On the bright side the plunging appoval ratings for George W. Bush (he now has two polls that put him at 31% approval) make a Jeb Bush run for the Presidency very unlikely.
| Share | | By Randall Parker at 2006 May 10 08:09 PM Politics American Presidency |
Here's an imaginary scenario to explain Bush's positions in terms of reproductive motivations: in his youth, Mexican mafiosi lured him into a bordello on the border, and caused him to become a sperm donor for several dozen poor Mexican women, so that they'd be sure of getting a few who looked rather like him. They wanted to blackmail someone from a powerful family, in order to win favor from the US government. Later Bush became infertile, and used artificial insemination to conceive his daughters. Now his continuity is all Mexican, so that he doesn't see the conflict of interest between Mexico and the US. Seeing the benefit from this approach, the mafiosi decided to get Bush's hidden daughters pregnant by stealing sperm from a close male relative of his, so that now he has extra-closely related Mexican grandchildren.
I was going to claim that Bush is a puppet reading a script and not truly "the decider". That dark forces are feeding him instructions etc. That a cabal of ultra elites have blackmailed the sh*t out of him. That they have 8mm film of Bush down in Mexico in the 70s having sex with a donkey. Or maybe killing some senorita by accident.
But then a thought came to me: Harriet Myers.
Those preschooler numbers may exaggerate the minority percentage, on account of heavier minority use of such day-care type programs, as would report racial-ethnic numbers. The higher the birth rate and the lower the average income of such groups, the more likely they are to dump their children into whatever program will take them, even when the mothers are not working.
The report went on about how latino immigrants were so eager to get education for their pre-schoolers; but what such people get is day-care on the public funding. These are groups with illegitimacy and high school dropout rates of around 50%. Education is not their motivation; day-care is.
More bio-imagination: Bush is infected by the virus S. vectorismus, which takes over the brains of its carriers, to the extent of having them extoll openness to dirty entities of all kinds. While posessing no consciousness itself, the virus has found a way to provoke the desire to have others to be more open to infectious agents, and to be enraged by fastidious closedness, specifically in terms of physical openness.
It has hijacked a sexual level of brain function, which influences a desire to command others to be more open. This connects to responses towards aggression, and if politics be the ethics of aggression, this value-openness-aggression connection is especially developed in the more political.
The virus has not yet appeared in East Asia in its virulent form. George Soros, and various open-borders advocates are carrying the most virulent form.
If Bush were put under hypnosis and regressed to a previous lifetime, we might discover that he is a reincarnation of Pancho Villa.
Or Pancho's horse.
Or some component thereof.
It's a benificent scheme by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. It has been decided that although the USA set off along promising lines under the guidance of that man of substance George Washington, it had deteriorated into an risible state under Slick Willie Clinton. To turn it away from folly, a man should be elected President who would forever be held up as an example of the folly of electing a Head of State who is simultaneously Head of Government. And lo it was done, by virtue of the uncanny powers of MI5 and MI6. Her Majesty recommends that you should find a respectable American family to serve as constitutional monarchs, or select a monarch by lot. Your Head of Government should be made routinely accountable by being required to justify his actions to the American Parliament, which should replace the interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, experiment of separate legislature and executive. (Even that slithey tove Mr Toni Blair will eventually be dismissed by parliament.) Her Majesty wishes the American people well in their search for a stable and competent government and draws their attention to the success of constitutional monarchy in Australia, the government of which happy Commonwealth has lately succeeded in repaying all its federal debt.
By Order of Her Majesty in Council, this day the 11th of May in the year of Our Lord 2006, The Hindsighter-General.
Oh, just to drag the discussion down ... those minority statistics come from the census. I have no reason to think that they use day-schools to gather statistics. I'm afraid we're in for bad times in about 20 years.
Suppose Bush did something highly ILLEGAL when he sold his Harken stock shortly after a mysterious Bahrain agreement for special drilling rights. If there are documents, or secretly recorded conversations, known to some of his Gulf "friends" and Texas mafia and, hey, maybe even the president of Mexico, then that would explain everything: BLACKMAIL. Hence tax cuts at all costs for his S&L supporters (how many billionaires in Texas got rich off that one?), hence Iraq instead of the Saudi's, hence open borders al la Vincent Fox.
How do you explain the Senators, particularly the Republican ones like McCain?
My theory is: George W. Bush's brains comprise mostly brown matter.
Its most likely the result of his consumption of alcohol and drugs in his earlier life. You will notice that Jorge tends to surround himself with people of similar personality traits that signify being alcoholic or having been an alcoholic in the past. John Bolton (the U.S. ambassador, not the one who posts here) is a good example. He has the "look and feel" of someone who is an alcoholic or was one in the past. Bush also seems to select people on the basis of loyalty rather than competence. Rice, among others, come to mind.
Steve Sailor has had entertaining commentary on what might go through Bush's mind.
He would see monkeys in movies, on T.V., in magazines, and in books....
He thought that some of these monkeys might be right for him....And
through the years, by keeping an ideal monkey expression fixed in his
mind....Or somewhere in the back of his mind....That he might, by
force of will, cause his head to approach those of his ideal....The
change would be very subtle....It might take eight years or so....
Gradually his head and brain would change its' form....A flatter nose...
Wider, thinner lips....Beady, blacker eyes....A larger mandible……
Hmmm, Bush keeps pushing for more and more illegal immigration and for more wars against Middle Eastern countries - man, I wonder whose agenda he might be serving here...
Has anyone here seen this piece by Paul Craig Roberts?
One of the simplest and most depressing explanation is just this: Bush think he's pursuing national interests, but because of a combination of personal ignorance, bounded rationality, and poor advice, his notions of national interest are just plain silly. He wouldn't be the first: countries often embrace ball-breaking notions of national interest, notions that look utterly absurd just a few years later, after they lead to the fall of the dynasty, the dismemberment of the national territory, Russians raping every woman in the capital, the loss of the entire army in a crazed attempt to conquer Morocco - you get the picture. Sometimes a ruling class has managed to correctly diagnose the strategic situation and then stick to a rational policy for generations, but usually that occurred in the context of a slowly-changing world. The British ruling class could stick to a policy of containing France's imperial ambitions (while winning valuable colonial prizes) for several generations - they didn't have to invent a new policy very often.
Only a few people in the ruling classes of the United States are any good at this kind of thing. Most are goony.