GW Bush – Blood in the Bucket

Americans from time to time assign their presidents nick names; examples are IKE, JFK, The Father of Our Country, and Old Hickory. President GW Bush himself however, likes to assign nicknames to others – who will forget some: Brownie (FEMA Director Brown), Fart Blossom (Karl Rove) or Cobra (NYT Columnist Maureen Dowd). It is time to assign him one: "Blood in the Bucket Bush" is what I had in mind.

First time I heard the term was as a kid when I lived in a Midwestern city. The outskirts of the city was populated by poor unskilled white workers from West Virginia and Kentucky who flocked North to work in the WWII defense industries. They lived in squatter shacks and second hand trailers, some without electricity, in an area called Black Oak. They brought with them evangelical tent ceremonies for those who were blessed; and a raucous dance bar, set up in a condemned building named BLOOD IN THE BUCKET for those unblessed, who did not see the light. As city kids we would ride our bikes to the rural area and sneak into the tent ceremonies to watch jumping, shouting and cavorting by the members. We were all Roman Catholics or conservative and strict protestants, so this practiced religion appeared as freakish entertainment and absolutely unfathomable. The evangelical parish was kind to us and sometimes served us Kool Aid and cookies, but it made no converts from our gang. During the advent of GW Bush, these people have become a main-stream religion. Probably unfairly, but when I hear those TV preachers such as "SEND MONEY" Baker, Swaggert, Falwell, and Robertson; the creepy childhood images from Black Oak still haunt me. As far as the religion today, I still consider it a strange attraction, but the world is what it is... The evangelists certainly do not have monopoly on disrepute in the American religious communities.

Blood in the Bucket was another thing... It stood in sharp contrast to the fanatic holy rollers in the tents. Saturday nights, usually the day after payday in the mills, the Blood in the Bucket rocked. Everybody was drunk on moonshine – knife fights and shootings were common as lonely men fought over the few long haired Loretta Lynn style country girls. Most of the other women, but without make up and rhinestones, were busy singing and waving their arms in the tents. Our gang stayed far away from the place, terrified by the reputation. It finally was burned down; most suspect arson by the God-fearing tent people. You know... the hand of God thing with help from God’s psalm singing children.

Blood in the Bucket is a fine sobriquet for GW Bush; wherever the President walks, the man leaves bloody footprints. In most cases his policies stimulate the mayhem; in some he is just ill fated – blighted by bloody disaster. The last category is Katrina where he and Brownie fumbled the ball and their ineptitude contributed to wholesale suffering and in some cases death. GW Bush’s culpability in 9/11 is still a coin toss; we know he ignored strategic warnings of the Jihad strike, but whether he could have stopped the attack is still moot. The Democrats in power in Congress now will go after the issue like a dog goes after a bone, so the last investigative chapter remains unwritten. Bush's bloody role in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq is categorical and has intensely fueled terrorism against the USA.

In Lebanon he tacitly encouraged Israel to destroy Lebanese infrastructure with made in America aircraft, iron bombs, and used cluster bombs on their population. In Palestine, Bush forced elections that Hamas democratically won, and then he withdrew his support for Palestine, because the election backfired on him. His effort to walk back the elections has now caused even more bloodshed in a civil war. War in Afghanistan is characterized by indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilian communities that even makes the US puppet Karzai gasp and call for it to stop. And Iraq... the US started a war of choice under false flags, (i.e. No WMD and Saddam and Bin Laden were not sweethearts), and to implant democracy by the sword. The war blew up in his face – horribly – there are many lost Americans who are dead and many more who are seriously wounded. A vast fortune has been extravagantly spent on the war, and by most standards, the war is lost as the country erupts into civil war.

As GW Bush's walls came tumbling down signaled by the 2006 elections, his father, former president HW Bush, stepped into the fray to rescue his boy. He told the world that his son is an honest man. Too bad he did not finish the sentence, for example: My son is honest but dumb...; My son is honest but likes to play with explosives...; My son is honest but weak and prefers to be led by his nose... To fix the Iraq problem, Daddy Bush ginned up a bipartisan Iraq study group headed by Jim Baker and former Democratic Congressman Lee Hamilton. Hamilton is the Republicans' pet Democrat and he was also hauled out to co-chair the 9/11 Commission. The study group has people like pro war Larry Eagleburger, who is Hopeless Henry Kissinger’s loyal retriever trained to fetch on command – give him a few drinks and he will do a Kissinger imitation, German Yiddish accent and all. Baker is by far the most competent and has in the past sometimes kept Israeli considerations at arms length, but his main role here is to protect what is left of GW Bush's shattered legacy; the committee recommendations will be a watered down compromise that most in Washington will salute, but expect the Shiite and Sunnis in Iraq to thumb their noses – at least those who do not speak English with a London accent which is 99.9999% of the people.

The US badly needs an exit strategy from Iraq, otherwise it will end up fleeing a burning Green Zone with shattered forces. Let us hope that the Baker/Hamilton duo can at least do that. Do not expect the military leadership to do it. The generals would rather be buried with WE ARE WINNING, chiseled on their tombstones than admit they lost the war.

There is a touch of irony that HW Bush crawled out of retirement to protect GW Bush. He started this whole Iraqi debacle with his invasion of Kuwait. HWB used every diplomatic chit he had for a real coalition invasion that included Syria and Saudi Arabia, so sonny boy had very few to use in Iraq War II. Bush I called for the Kurds and Shiites to revolt and who because they did, were brutally punished by Saddam as Bush stood by – I never understood the difference between buying oil from Saddam or from corrupt Kuwaiti sheiks, but unlike senior Bush I never had to deflect public attention from raising taxes after promising READ MY LIPS. His Iraqi war did not help him get reelected; he was turned from office after four years as Clinton and Perot ripped out his guts during the campaign.

We have two more dreadful years of Bucket of Blood Bush as the country pointlessly bleeds in Iraq. He still has the pro Israeli neocons and Israeli lobby dancing on his head to stay the course and to invade Iran. Daddy Bush may have to put him in a straight jacket and clamp an iron mask over his head to prevent a spastic response to bomb more heathens. The tent people in Black Oak and the torching of the bar, Bucket of Blood, taught me early never to underestimate the determination of religious fanatics; this includes Jihadists and Zionists – this attitude was reenforced later at Indiana University in 1954 when I graduated with James Walker Jones of the Destructive Doomsday Cult. He made the words DRINK THE KOOL AID famous, as the call-sign for religious nut cases. Robert E Bartos Colonel USA RET