I Miss George Bush

Those are four words I never thought I would utter, or write, or think. And I don’t mean George “The Puppet Master” ex-CIA, Golden Triangle, Daddy Bush, I mean Shrub.

I’ve been writing incendiary meanderings for years, mostly to myself, and looking back over my scribblings from years past I notice that I spent a lot of time bemoaning the antics of Shrub.

You know the litany of really jacked up shit he did, or at least the top ten on my personal hit parade: (1) misleading the American people into believing that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction when he knew they didn’t; (2) invading a sovereign nation without provocation and in violation of international law; (3) waging an illegal war without a declaration of war; (4) engaging in war to steal the natural resources of a sovereign nation; (5) authorizing torture in violation of international law; (6) authorizing spying on American citizens without appropriate judicial approval; (7) illegally detaining American citizens and foreign nationals; (8) kidnapping foreign nationals without due process (9) transporting them to third party countries for the express purpose of torturing them and placing them outside of domestic legal protection; and (10) tampering with elections and violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

So how messed up is it that I miss the days when I could easily characterize and categorize the many misdeeds of Shrub. And I still believe that sumbitch should have been impeached. He was stupid and wrong-headed … but at least he wasn’t crazy.

I was concerned, as were many, that he was eroding our civil rights faster than an ice cube melts in the desert. I feared he appealed to the lowest common denominator with his vilification of “intellectuals.” I knew that he longed for a time when everybody knew their places – as long as his place and those who he identified with were at the top.

But I never really feared he’d get pissed off at someone for a tweet and drop the bomb. I never believed he would carve up the populace into disfavored demographics and cart them off to internment camps. I never thought his advisors were thoroughly, irredeemably evil and completely without scruples – well, except maybe for Dick “The Evil One” Cheney that is. I didn’t fear that one morning I’d wake to the sound of jackboots marching in the street.

With Trump, I can’t even count the number of outlandish things he’s said and done in his short tenure, because he’s too busy denying what he said yesterday and declaring that the things he got caught doing today are false news.

Here is a man who is so unbalanced that he is completely unpredictable. Nothing seems off limits. With him, nothing is impossible. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

He could sell out our country to Russia for the price of his private debt forgiveness. If he has any. Which we can’t tell because he won’t release his tax returns for the current decade.

He could drive other countries to ally themselves with China – and then piss China off with his accusatory rhetoric.

He could build a wall across the Mexican border … okay so he’d have trouble with the parts going over the Rio Grande, I admit … and suddenly the world’s sixth largest economy called California would plummet and take the rest of the country with it.

He could start another war in retaliation for a terrorist attack that never happened – like the one he made up about Sweden.

He could declare marshal law if he decides the various demonstrations against his presidency pose a threat to national security.

You just don’t know with this guy. And I, for one, am afraid to find out.