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Richard Nixon trained Dick Cheney and Karl Rove as Dirty Tricksters. Nixon is Bush's role model for corruption, cynicism and personal psychosis. But Nixon was also a skilled, literate global diplomat who opened doors to China and the former Soviet Union and supported environmental protection. Bush has trashed all that.
Herbert Hoover callously presided over the beginnings of America's worst economic depression. Bush is right there. But Hoover was also a skilled, literate bureaucrat, and a Quaker-raised foe of war. Not exactly Bush.
Warren G. Harding was astonishingly corrupt. Bush, Halliburton and Enron have more than matched him. But Harding also hated repression and brought the anti-war socialist Eugene V. Debs straight from a federal prison cell to meet him in the Oval Office. Bush might well have had Debs executed.
Ultimately, Bush's real peers are not US presidents but Third World dictators, like Pinochet, many of whom his father also put in office. Their coda is clear:
Use of "terror" as an excuse for totalitarian control;
Official secrecy for its own sake;
Seizure of power in contempt of free elections;
Totalitarian militarism;
Abuse of human rights and liberties;
Love of the death penalty;
Hatred of a free press;
Imprisonment without legal recourse;
Widespread torture;
Brazen theft of public billions;
"Free market" smokescreens for corporate domination;
Taxing the poor to benefit the rich;
Hatred of labor unions;
Decimation of the natural environment;
Assaulting elected leaders anywhere, anytime;
Contempt for international treaties;
Reactionary alliance with right wing church groups;
Contempt for women's rights;
Manipulating divisions of race and class.
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http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_8276.shtml