By: Kevin Phillips, former top Republican strategist in the Nixon White House. His new book is called "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush."
Excerpt:
Kevin Phillips: What I'm going to try to talk about today will be -- it's only humorous in a kind of odd vein. It's the notion of having the Bushes as America's first real dynasty, and what that signifies, and what it means, and how it developed, and, more to the point, where it's going. I’ll try to look at this -- and I think it's an effective way to illustrate what they are, and some of what's been carrying through in the Middle East. I'll try to go through five episodes of Bushes and scandals in the Middle East. It's not hard to do at all. That's the amazing thing, and we talk about the economics and other aspects, things that have been omitted from the dialogue in the last five or six years. This is certainly one of them.
But let me start by talking about the question of “lying Presidents.” Because obviously, it didn't start with the Bushes. We can all remember Linden Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton. These were major league prevaricators. That's a fact. But they were all first-generation fibbers. What we're looking at with the Bushes is a multigenerational family of fibbers. And they share aspects of this, and rationales and antecedents for the pattern. They have a distinct logic. From the beginnings of the Bush Dynasty, in the period around World War I, with two of the current President's great-grandfathers, what we have had is a family that has emerged over the years in close contact with what Eisenhower later referred to as the “military industrial complex,” and very close relations with the intelligence community, and in a whole series of episodes that drew on the relations with armaments, arms dealers, intelligence, rogue banks, all kinds of things like that. And there’s enough of a pattern that you would think that when the dynasty was about to become fulfilled, if that's the word, by the advent of George W., that this would have been worth some comment. Now, it's hard for me to make something funny out of this. It's kind of tragic. As I go through these five episodes quickly, you will notice that some of the people that I refer to, who were involved in blowing the whistle on them, were Republicans. Part of what I think is at stake here tonight is understanding that there's much more involved here than ordinary ideology. You're not in some respects talking as much about left and right as you might think. This is a development in American history that's rife with negative meaning, for democracy with a small d and for republicanism with a small r, for American traditions going way back.
SNIP!
Excellent interview presentation. Find it here at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/17/1530204 
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