Barbara Bush: An American Monster

I have been fortunate—nay, blessed—to grow up among some very hip tribal elders, men and women who have been Fighting the Good Fight for decades before I was born.  This is what Korzybski called “time-binding”: instead of having to duplicate their experiences, I could learn from them and get up to speed before diving into the meat grinder of United States politics and culture.

An observation: although most of my generation loathes George W. Bush, and most of our older siblings and cousins see the real threat as his father, all the old wisdom in the NEK places the real Problem on the shoulders of Barbara Bush.  They say that families are the true seat of power, and the real power in a family is the woman.  And as ever, they’re right. 

“War is not nice”: Wisdom from Babs

Of course, nearly every English speaking human on Earth has heard her most recent and infamous whopper, spoken during a tour of the Hurricaine Katrina aftermath:

“What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

She was talking about the Houston Astrodome, which was housing nearly 25,000 people at the time. 

There is also her classic demonstration of what being a “Compassionate Conservative” is all about, from the Good Morning America show on March 12, 2003:

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

Less known, but much more telling, is the following comment from an interview with Larry King:

...you can criticize me, but don’t criticize my children and don’t criticize my daughters-in-law and don’t criticize my husband, or you’re dead.

It’s a very bland interview for the most part, but then again, Hannah Arendt had that great phrase about “the banality of evil”.  Dig this discussion of the death penalty, for instance:

KING: Your son has had to sign—your husband was never Governor, so he wasn’t faced with this. Your husband has had to sign death warrants.

BUSH: My sons.

KING: Your sons, rather. In two states that do it a lot, sadly. What do you think of the death penalty?

BUSH: Well, I’m a little tougher maybe than I should be, but I think it’s a deterrent. I really do. I think, if you think you can kill somebody and take a life—I would like to live in a world where I didn’t think that was true, but I think that’s—that’s Barbara Bush, not George Bush, not George W. Bush, not Jeb Bush.

KING: DNA evidence, though, showing a lot of people didn’t do it?

BUSH: Well, we have DNA now. So we don’t have to worry about that, don’t we?

KING: No. I mean in the past, you might think we have killed someone who didn’t do it.

BUSH: That’s terrible. That would be terrible. But we’ve had 12 years to—they go on forever and ever, all those appeals.

KING: Do you have a lot of faith? Are you a religious person?

BUSH: Yes. I mean, besides going to church every Sunday, I pray every night.

KING: You do?

BUSH: George Bush and I pray every night.

She also has some genuine zingers up her sleeve:

“Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.”

“Really, I think all the spouses of leaders feel like we’re sort of in the same club, if you know what I mean.”

CLICK TO ENLAAAARGE THE BUSH COMPOUND

Obviously, though, Brainsturbator has an axe to grind.  We’re not showing the full picture, like Barbara Bush’s generosity and selfless charity.  For instance, after making those apparently callous remarks about the Katrina survivors, Babs sprang into action, Bush Style:

Former first lady Barbara Bush donated an undisclosed amount of money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund with specific instructions that the money be spent with an educational software company owned by her son Neil.

Since then, the Ignite Learning program has been given to eight area schools that took in substantial numbers of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

“Mrs. Bush wanted to do something specifically for education and specifically for the thousands of students flooding into the Houston schools,” said Jean Becker, former President Bush’s chief of staff. “She knew that HISD was using this software program, and she’s very excited about this program, so she wanted to make it possible for them to expand the use of this program.”

---from this Houston Chronicle story

There has also been speculation about Babs being related to Aleister Crowley, but that’s mostly wishful thinking from hateful people.  It’s also based on this blog post from April 1, 2006, which is a very entertaining example of a good prank.  (Like how I fell for the Mandelbrot Monk hoax in the last crop circle post.)

Was Chavez right?

I was in midair when I saw Hugo Chavez give his barn-burner speech at the UN General Assembly.  Our plane, like every other jet over NYC at that moment, was in a holding pattern because Air Force One was getting ready to take off: Bush II was fleeing the city while Hugo Chavez stood at the podium and dropped bombs:

The devil is right at home. The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house.

And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday the devil came here. Right here.

And it smells of sulfur still today.

Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world.

There’s also the troubling implications of what exactly was going on in Omaha, Nebraska back in 1989, a question we’ve asked before at Brainsturbator. 

I wouldn’t even be speculating like this if the entire Bush family wasn’t constantly going out of their way to fuel our paranoia by flashing the devil horns every time they set foot in front of a camera. No, really. 

We’ve all seen a shot or two of Bush II flashing the Slayer Salute, and that’s something you can discard as harmless gestures from a slow monkey.  The trouble is, those occasional photos really start to add up after awhile.  Why does it happen so often?  Why does everyone in the family do it?

College Football, that’s why.  It’s a 50 year old tradition down in Texas, known as the “Hook ‘Em Horns”, and it signifies support for the University of Texas football team, the Longhorns.  Yep, that’s really the explanation, we hate to disappoint all the NWO-fearing, Illuminati-fighting True Believers out there—but after all, there’s more than enough evidence of Pure Evil in the Bush clan already. 

This is not a new misunderstanding, either: in 1985, a group of visiting Texans were arrested for flashing the “Hook ‘Em Horns” in front of the Vatican while drunkenly celebrating a televised victory.  So with that tradition in mind, we present the following:

An Exhaustive Gallery of Bush Family Satanic Salutes

Further Reading for Curious Primates

From the Brainsturbator Library:

George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography—Tarpley

The Best Deomcracy Money Can Buy—Greg Palast

Americas Secret Establishment: An Introduction to Skull and Bones—Anthony Sutton

Hilariously Worthless Wikipedia on Barbara Bush