But first, some comic relief…

 

One of the most powerful essays to have been published on the Bush presidency was sparked by the Bush speech before Israel’s Knesset, brilliantly parroted by conservative talking head Kevin James in the clip above. Here are Bush’s comments:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals,
as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong
all along,” Bush said at Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration in
Jerusalem.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said in remarks to
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in
1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked
to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation
to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has
been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Larisa Alexandrovna, of rawstory.com and AtLargely.com, wrote a breathtaking response in the form of a letter to the President Bush himself, calling him out on this blithe anti-Obama rant on foreign shores. 

Alexandrovna organizes her piece into five sections, devoting two to Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush:

Your family’s fortune is built on the bones of the very people butchered by
the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the Knesset who
applauded you today:

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s grandfather was a director
of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a
German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler’s rise to power,
government documents show.

Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp.
(search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the
Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives
documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism.

And this:

Your family did not stop with supporting fascists and Nazis abroad,
did they Mr. Bush? Surely you must know of your grandfather’s role in
the treasonous plot of 1933 to overthrow democracy in America? Let me
remind you.

Grandpa Bush – that is to say, your grandfather – wanted fascism
imported into the United States, or as you now call this type of
transformation, “exporting democracy.” Prescott went so far as to
subsidize a coup attempt in order to achieve his dream of a fascist
America (see BBC report below):

Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in
1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling
President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war
veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most
famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea,
Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that
their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat
the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest
ever peacetime threat to American

Alexandrovna then clears aside Prescott Bush and moves down two generations to George W. Bush himself, calling Iraq Bush’s Poland:

I will therefore make your history lesson brief, but to the point.
The unprovoked attack on Poland by Germany was a war crime just as your
attack against Iraq – based on lies – is a war crime. This is not my
opinion. This is not a political attack. This is a fact. Consider the
words of the esteemed former chief prosecutor in the Nuremburg trials,
Benjamin Ferencz, regarding your war of aggression against Iraq:

“…Prima facie case can be made that the United States is
guilty of the supreme crime against humanity, that being an illegal war
of aggression against a sovereign nation.”

Moreover, your reckless verbiage and partisan pandering using
something as tragic and criminal as Germany’s war of aggression against
Poland is an insult to all victims of those atrocities.

My grandfather’s sister and parents were having supper in their
Warsaw home when a German bomb erased them from this planet. Your
evoking the German atrocities against Poland in order to play dirty
politics against Democrats is as offensive to me as if you had pinned a
swastika onto your lapel.

And thence on to a section called “Your very own concentration camps”:

You ordered the creation of secret camps all over the world and on
US territory where you also authorized the torture of countless men,
women and children is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,
international law, and domestic law. In other words, you authorized war
crimes.

We don’t know the number of people you have had disappeared,
tortured, and possibly murdered. Although we have some idea of what
these numbers may be, I doubt the full truth of it all will ever be
known.

In 2005, I had a CENTCOM document leaked to me
illustrating that since the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,
more than 70,000 men, women, and children have been detained at one of
your various camps Mr. Bush. We don’t know what happened to them, if
they were tortured, raped, or murdered. What we do know is that less
than 2% of those 70,000 had any sort of charge brought against them in
a court of law. None of those alleged crimes, by the way, were acts of
terrorism. We don’t know if that 70,000 figure was the actual and full
count of detainees in US custody around the world in 2005. But it is
safe to say that in the last 3 years since this document was published,
the number of detainees has likely grown.

What we also now know, in great horror, is that at least one of your camps had a crematorium in it, which some of the US soldiers stationed there suspected was used for burning bodies:

“We had some kind of incinerator at the end of our building,”
Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. “It was this huge circular thing. We just
didn’t know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people,
for all we knew–bodies.” Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. “It had
bones in it,” he said, and he called it the crematorium. “But hey,
you’re at war,” he said. “Suck it up or drive on.”

She ends her letter with this:

I am ashamed of you Mr. Bush. I am ashamed of those who applauded
your political porn played out against the hallowed backdrop of the
Holocaust. I am ashamed of those reporters with you, who between them
could not muster the moral courage to call you out on your ugly
rhetoric and ask you about your own family Nazi ties. You are, sir, the
most abhorrent human being of my lifetime. I dare say, in the lifetime
of this nation.

This is a passionate, emotional, spot-on and devastating piece of writing from one of the best reporters on the planet, and I strongly urge you to read the whole thing at AtLargely.com

The greatest disservice we can do the generations to follow would be to let this man pass through history without having to face up to the terrible crimes he has forced on us.  They’ll haunt us long after he retires to the pleasures of Crawford.