Ex-Reagan Aide Calls Bush a "Mass Murderer"

Posted by Liliana Segura at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2007.

Back in his pre-coronation days, when George W. was still known as "Governor Bush," the Campaign to End the Death Penalty had a bestselling item in its fundraising kit: a t-shirt with a mugshot of the future president splashed across the front, reading "WANTED FOR MURDER." Bush's crowning legacy at the time was having racked up a record-breaking 152 executions in the state of Texas--and doing so with a clear-eyed callousness that was at once startling and sickening.

Little did we know that less than ten years later, Bush would have more blood on his hands than we could possibly imagine.

He's drenched in it. Between the massive death toll in Iraq--655,000 as of last fall--to those anguished masses who would become bloated bodies in New Orleans, Bush has shown a boundless capacity for cruel and unusual punishment for those whose lives are expendable in the racist La La land that his administration calls home.

To those of us in the real world, the resulting death count is staggering, impossible to wrap our head around. It's like the comedian Eddie Izzard's riff on Pol Pot:

"...You killed a hundred thousand people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can't even get down the gym! Your diary must look odd: Get up in the morning, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death, Death...Lunch. Death, Death, Death...Afternoon Tea...Death, Death, Death...Quick shower..."

One person sees the black humor--but he's not laughing. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Reagan aide who has earned a reputation for being a saber-toothed critic of the Bush administration recently posted an article on Antiwar.com, where he sounds the alarm on Bush's attack plans against Iran, arguing that a military strike would result in so many additional deaths it would place Bush even higher on the list of "mass murderers of all time"--a distinction, Roberts says, the president already holds.

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power," he writes. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

Roberts's ire doesn't stop with Bush and Co. He lambastes the media for its endless coverage of Larry Craig's bathroom habits, and criticizes the public's focus on "why a South Carolina beauty queen cannot answer a simple question about why her generation is unable to find the United States on a map." (Admission: On this point I think Roberts may need to chill out a little. I mean, have you seen that YouTube video? Holy shit, that's priceless. Priceless! Comedy gold, people. But I digress.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, Bush = murderer. Also, pay attention you media morons. Iran in is the crosshairs and you're busy obsessing over Princess Di--the very definition of a non-news story. (She died, guys. TEN YEARS AGO.) Meanwhile we've got a seriously dangerous royal type on our hands, one so wildly out of touch with his constituents, I reach for another Izzard quote for illustration--"Oh, you're a plumber...what on earth is that?"--and one who is utterly indifferent to the human beings in the countries he so blithely bombs. As his administration lays waste to the Middle East (in order to save it), "for Bush, civilian casualties are a non-issue," Roberts says. "Hegemony uber alles."

Tagged as: bush, craig, dealth penalty, princess di, paul craig roberts

Liliana Segura is a writer and activist living in New York