Glenn Greenwald: Deleting the Bush Personality Cult from history

[laststeamtrain]

Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday Sept. 2, 2009 13:03 EDT
Deleting the Bush Personality Cult from history

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

National Review's Jay Nordlinger -- and others at that magazine -- are upset that a school is showing a year-old video in which various celebrities spout feel-good platitudes about public service, and -- for a fleeting second -- Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher vow to "be of service to the President." This sentiment -- a desire to serve the President -- is something conservatives would never adopt, apparently:

"When I read about that celebrity video where they say, “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama,” I thought that the people do not deserve to be American citizens, because they have no idea what America or a liberal republic is. . . . Also, it strikes me that "I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama" is the product of a thoroughly secular mind, which is another marker of contemporary America. . . . Did conservatives ever say “I pledge to be of service to Ronald Reagan”? I never heard it -- and the notion is preposterous."

<snip>

Beyond the DOJ, huge swaths of the right-wing movement were devoted to an unprecedented veneration of George Bush. A whole industry on the Right was created to convert him into a warrior-deity, including truly creepy reverence books by National Review writers (see here for various illustrations). Some on the Right actually speculated that God intervened in our elections because he had hand-picked Bush to be our leader. Even Bill Kristol admitted that the GOP had turned into little more than a Bush-centered personality cult, telling the New York Times: "Bush was the movement and the cause." More than any single, discrete issue, what motivated me to begin writing about political issues was the warped climate of hero worship constructed -- by the Right and the media -- around George Bush as a "War President."

If you search long enough on the Internet, can you find examples of random people or vapid celebrities guilty of excessive Obama worship? Obviously. One can find virtually anything using those methods. But the personalized veneration of George Bush, particularly during his first term, was systematic and engulfing. It was the fuel that drove most of the abuses and transgressions of that era. The New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller infamously confessed that asking hard questions of Bush was "frightening" due to the prevailing political climate. To read right-wing pundits proclaiming that such a sentiment would never be embraced by a conservative is really remarkable -- only because it's such a powerful testament to the ability of people to just forget and/or completely whitewash even the most recent history.

<more>

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/02/bush/index.html

[Dr_Willie_Feelgood]

1. NO ONE should ever pledge alligence...

...to a person, a flag, a deity, a government.

The ONLY thing one should pledge alligence to is a noble ideal.