“Manifest Destiny” May Explain Bush’s Apparent Hypocrisy

by Brendan Lalor

During a Bush interview for a D-Day edition of Dateline NBC, Tom Brokaw questioned Bush’s recent comparison of his Misadventure in Iraq with World War II. In response, Bush attempted to sustain the Big Lie that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a counter-response to the 9/11 attacks. Continuing to blur the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein distinction, Bush said:

there were similarities to World War II… The similarities were when we were attacked in an unprovoked fashion in World War II and on September the 11, 2001.

Unfortunately, more than a year of Bush Administration propaganda has many duped Americans nodding along.

Bush continued, too arrogant to notice the plank in his own eye, but eager to point out the splinter in his neighbor’s:

Another similarity is that there are people who have got this kind of distorted sense of the world, trying to impose their will. Fascism on the one hand, and fanaticism on the other.

At first pass, it appears he completely fails to comprehend that he is a fanatical religious-capitalist Empire-building ideologue. But, on reflection, I suspect that while he may be dimly aware of this, he does not see it as hypocrisy. He sees his own case as different from others’; he has “God on his side,” and, in the spirit of “Manifest Destiny,” “imposing his will” on the world is perfectly proper. His delusional dream of Empire is our real-life nightmare.

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