The bewildering mind of President Bush

By Ellis Washington

Democrats are liberals first.

~ Rush Limbaugh, conservative intellectual

I want to revisit the Kennedy Center Honors held last Saturday. When the media repeatedly looped President Bush giving legendary singer and liberal activist Barbra Streisand a kiss on the right side of her cheek, while for the past eight years giving conservative Republicans the backside of his hand, I had to seriously contemplate to myself … What makes President Bush act in the manner that he does?

An excerpt from an article reads: “Art transcends politics this weekend,” the longtime Democrat [Streisand] said beforehand. Still, she said it would have been “lovely” if she could have received the award while President-elect Barack Obama was in office.

Dear reader, please indulge me here. I mean no vulgarity, but in the tradition of Socratic dialectical reasoning, I am simply poising the question based on a series of bizarre occurrences by Bush going back to when our commander in chief mysteriously “chocked” on a pretzel while watching a movie alone inside the White House.

While admittedly this article is speculative, I do not intend to be mean-spirited. I sincerely want to understand the mind and actions of President Bush. Why does he do what he does? Are there some medication issues the American people should be aware of? After all, “We the People” have a right to determine whether America’s president, the leader of the free world, the most powerful man of the most powerful nation in the history of the world, is psychologically strong enough to deal with being president of the United States. Even at this late hour in his presidency, I’m not at all convinced that he is.

Generally, we live in a free and open society, a culture that generally fosters a transparent inquiry of knowledge and information. While there are privacy laws regarding issues of national security, President Bush, as an elected official, gives up a certain amount of privacy to the public to serve the people as president. One of those modes of inquiry surrounds his mental and physical fitness to be president, an inquiry that can and should be made whenever appropriate throughout his term in office.

When I viewed footage of Bush giving Streisand a kiss, it was a surreal and disturbing experience for me, which brought to memory the terrorist Yasser Arafat kissing the hand of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s widow, Leah, at his funeral, Nov. 6, 1995.

As a Christian and a lover of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel who has dedicated my entire career to furthering a Judeo-Christian tradition of intellectual thought, I considered Leah Rabin’s affection for Arafat tantamount to treason, a blasphemous act that affronted many Israelis and other supporters of the Jewish state throughout the world. Why? Because the hand she held was stained with the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Israelis shed since 1946 when Arafat, just 17 years old, cut his rapacious teeth smuggling weapons into Palestine to kill Brits and Israelis, just after World War II.

Eventually, Arafat murdered his way to the top by becoming head of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, a rise to power he achieved by killing innocent Jews and Arab Christians who did not subscribe to his evil methods.

The writer of the article on Leah Rabin and Arafat in part wrote:

Leah Rabin’s readiness at her late husband Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral to show her true feelings about his former political associates and rivals by accepting a kiss of sympathy from his long-time rival within the Labor Party Shimon Peres but turning away from Likud Party leader Binyamin Netanyahu set off a spate of Leah-watching articles in both the U.S. and Israel. … The Washington Post reported that on his condolence call to the Rabin apartment in Tel Aviv, Yasser Arafat kissed the Rabin grandchildren and said, “You are my family now.”

To use a biblical analogy, for Leah to allow a kiss from Arafat would be like Mordecai kissing the hand of Haman or Jesus kissing the hand of King Herod – unthinkable!

To explain the actions of liberalism and liberals, conservative Rush Limbaugh is fond of saying, “Democrats are liberals first.” What this means beyond a superficial understanding is that if conservatism is a politics of the Spirit and liberalism is a politics of the flesh, then in their purest forms these two ideologies cannot logically or morally mix. Therefore, any Republican that ascribes to or accepts the underlying premises of liberalism is being self-contradictory.

The basic presumptions of liberalism are:

  • The Leviathan State is sovereign above God;
  • The “common good” over individual rights; and
  • The Marxist aphorism, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” which is the central premise that created the FDR/LBJ and now Barack Obama socialist welfare state.

Conservatives and Republican politicians, to curry favor from the media or Democrats, endeavor to ape liberalism or socialist programs, causing them to exemplify contradictory and anti-conservative policies, thus assuring their descent into political oblivion (for example: George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, et al.).

Likewise, as with liberal Jews and other socialists of every racial cant, you must remember that “Democrats (Socialists) are liberals first.” Therefore, there is a synergy with Bush kissing Streisand as when you see Leah Rabin allow the murderous Arafat the public affection of kissing her hand, while slandering conservative Netanyahu at every opportunity.

This human behavior transcends mere politics and ventures into the sacred realm of the soul and spirit – a defilement of the soul and a perversion of the spirit that views philosophy, politics, law, religion, economics, education, science, medicine and policy not through the lens of logic and reason, but through the paradigm of Nietzsche’s, “Der Wille zur Macht” [Will to Power], a “self-overcoming,” humanist “redemption.” In other words, I want what I want, when I want it, how I want it, and God, logic and truth be damned!

This is my attitude regarding the rise and fall of the Bush presidency: Let Bush kiss whomever he wants, let Bush gleefully offer hand sanitizers to Obama upon their first face-to-face meeting, let Bush appoint a “car czar” as a remedy to the financial woes of the Big Three automakers, let Secretary of State Condi Rice beg the queen of England to play a recital at Buckingham Palace while Muslim fanatics run wild all over the world, let President-elect Obama promise to give America FDR, part II (a “new New Deal”).

… And when the entire invention collapses upon its own weight, I believe that America’s rugged individualism will once again be resurrected from the ashes of socialism to rebuild a new and better America conceived in liberty, morality and Veritas (truth).


Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is a former staff editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at the Rutherford Institute. He is a professor of Constitutional Law, Legal Ethics, and Contracts at the National Paralegal College, a counselor at the American College of Education, and a founding board member of Salt and Light Global. Washington is a co-host of "Joshua's Trial," a radio show of Christian conservative thought. A graduate of John Marshall Law School and post-grad work at Harvard Law School, his latest law review article is titled, "Social Darwinism in Nazi Family and Inheritance Law." Washington’s latest book is a 2-volume collection of essays and Socratic dialogues – "The Progressive Revolution" (University Press of America, 2013). Visit his popular law/political blog, "EllisWashingtonReport.com, an essential repository dedicated to educating the next generation of young conservative intellectuals. Read more of Ellis Washington's articles here.