George Bush-Ghostbuster
This seems too weird to be true, but the source is the editor of the Charleston Gazette.
Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.
Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."
This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its "coalition of the willing" to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush's call and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs."
It's like a rejected plot from "Ghostbusters".
My buddy Saladin just reported this. I mean it scares the bejeeesus out of me. Chirac would have been steeped in European History by the time he was six. He knew all about all of the popes and the silly fables and myths.
He would have sighed and thought, how dumb are Americans.
And yet, with C-Street and Blackwater and Ashcroft and all this right wing Christian crap......
We are in a cultural war, right now in this country.
Is the world six thousand years old, do certain organizations actually foster and train international armies? YES
this is no joke any longer.
the end
August 10, 2009 1:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm on the outs with a number of family members because of this very thing and the undeniable stupidity of it. They actually think it is rational. The real insane part is some are doctors and lawyers who go to church with their families every Sunday. But the other six days of the week are unaccounted for.
As I commented in another post, the guide for all our actions is to make money. That was the prevailing view of the lawyer particularly. He even went so far as to state that even an obligation under law, unless he gets compensated, is often ignored. This sounds so like what happens in our government where our lawmakers and regulators don't uphold existing law if there is no benefit or if there is a negative benefit. This discretionary enforcement of our laws has grown to epidemic proportions in government at all levels. This is major screwed up. It will always end with persons who have the most money getting 'justice' and everyone else getting the shaft. Which is exactly what we have. What a mess.
August 10, 2009 2:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the Shoutout DD! Here's the link. My blog has a few links that give more background.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/saladin/2009/08/bush-really-was-a-religious-nu.php
August 10, 2009 1:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I certainly have no plan to defend Bush, but it would be nice to have more than one source. I do not see any French language links or French/Swiss news papers.
Scratch all that... is apparently a link to the French language article... And it seems to say what Taplin says it says.
August 10, 2009 1:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
And some day I will write my html code correctly...., but the link works.
August 10, 2009 1:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
This story was blogged on Daily Kos almost two years ago by Jacob Freeze, "the prophetic wonder-man of political blogging," based on a report on the French site Rue89, which was also picked up by Truthout.
Rue89 also claimed that Ronald Reagan had referred to the same prophecy from Ezekiel 38:1-6...
Those wacky Republicans! What will they dream up next?
August 10, 2009 4:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Except that, Ghostbusters is a comedy. There's nothing funny about this story, if it's true.
August 10, 2009 1:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Comedy is tragedy in disguise.
August 10, 2009 3:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems like the last resort, when facts and logic are not persuasive, play the Jesus card!
August 10, 2009 1:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
C'mon guys. According to "Family of Secrets," Bush was telling a journalist in 1999 that if he became president he wanted to fight any war, big or small, because it would boost his popularity and allow him to ram through his agenda.
The guy was raised by Mr. CIA, and got the best education in manipulation of the public possible.
Even his religious conversion was highly dubious, as it came after years of studying long memos written by his father's top Evangelical advisor.
As a lifelong partier, Bush knew he could never be a successful politician in Texas if he didn't become born again.
This is a guy who was emulating his father's political glad-handing since he was 13, and who almost ran for Congress at age 25, before ultimately running 10 years later.
The entire legend of W being disinterested in running for office and the office of the Presidency was written by Karl Rove and Karen Hughes.
He laughs at us while we laugh at him, and that is the ultimate source of his arrogant smirk.
August 10, 2009 2:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
But if Bush's religious crackpottery were all an act, why put it on display to Chirac and the Palestinian foreign minister -- neither of whom had the slightest incentive to buy into it?
No, with George, what you saw was what you got: a Bible-thumping moron.
August 10, 2009 3:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. While we were laughing ourselves silly, he was accomplishing everything he set out to do, re foreign policy, at least. The greatest mistake anyone can make is to underestimate enemies.
August 10, 2009 7:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you give him too much credit. The evidence seems to indicate pretty clearly that he was a hard partier and general black sheep of the family who found the Lord and committed sobriety. His mind seems to be the kind that mixes insecurity, the arrogance of privilege, guilt and paranoia (in large supply on the Right), and does with them all exactly what he has done. I don't think it takes belief in a conspiracy to explain George W. He's a perfect expression of 40 years of the marriage of corporate right-wingers and the Evangelical movement.
August 10, 2009 8:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't doubt that George Wetbehindtheears invoked the bible in that occasion, but as only one of his thousands of dumb remarks, I would not over-weight it. In a much larger context, and in congruence (not for the first time) with Bill Walker above, this comment from the Charleston paper shows how clueless Americans still are:
"For six years, Americans really haven’t known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack."
People, it was obvious AT THE TIME! Bush followed Cheney's plan for attacking Iraq (once the spineless Democrats signed the October, 2002 blank check) in order to run for ELECTION (not re-election, the Supreme Court installed him in 2000) as a "WAR" PRESIDENT! The Democrats and the "progressive left," as Rove correctly predicted, imploded into a cloud of confused cowardice trying to straddle "stop the war" and "support the troops" and the chickenhawks got tens of millions of apathetic and ill-informed Americans to vote for them in 2004. Of course, we cannot now recoup the thousands of Americans dead, the tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, and the trillions of dollars wasted trashing our military strength and international influence, but can we at least finally pull our heads out of the sand on what happened?
August 10, 2009 6:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
couldn't it be that the white house's march to war involved a confluence of factors? couldn't bush also believe that he was going to defeat gog amd magog?
it took a lot of different folks with a lot of different agendas getting on board to march the country into that war. your storyline simplifies matters to make them more easily digestible but the reality is more complicated (and causes a much more troubling indigestion).
August 10, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course there were multiple factors involved, but the central political rationale is massively denied by so-called "liberals" because it doesn't fit their feeble-minded "Imperial America" dogma, and because it would mean admitting the culpability represented by the utter spinelessness of most Congressional Democrats in the run-up to what one reporter's seminal book termed the "worst U.S. foreign policy decision ever taken." "Denial" does not even apply of course to huge swathes of Rove-Bush coalition who were and are too willingly ignorant to grasp the fact that no compelling U.S. national interest was EVER involved in the cakewalk to get Osaddam bin Hussein WMDs and do a repeat of Germany and Japan 1945 on Iraq.
August 10, 2009 2:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
The people that gave us the Bush/Cheney gang for 8 years are still here and now babbling about Obama's birth certificate, disrupting town hall meetings on health care reform, wearing Mexican sombreros with tea bags hanging from the brims.
By the way, their leaders are FOX, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, John, Kyl,
Michele Bachman, Lou Dobbs, Liz Cheney, and Birther leader; dentist/real estate agent/lawyer
Orly Taitz.
August 10, 2009 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yep...cue the music.
This is exactly why the founders wanted separation of church and state...for whack jobs like Bush and the Junta. And JohnW is right these are the same kind of people who are babbling about Obama's birth certificate...and they must be stopped because they are completely nucking futs.
You can't run a country by a book of religion not by heap or a lump or a smidgeon.
August 10, 2009 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
when there are individuals in power who have fantasy beliefs, it is a recipe for a toxic international political brew. here are the ingredients:
christians: Jesus will come to rescue Israel, defeat the Antichrist (Rev. 19:11-21), judge the nations (Matt. 25:31-46) and the wicked in Israel (Ezek. 20:33-38), and rule over the messianic kingdom.
jews: The Messiah will defeat the gentile nations (Zech 14:10) and restore the kingdom of Israel (Zech 14). The Jews in exile will return and rule in an age of spiritual harmony (Zech 14:5).
muslims: Jesus (Isa) will return to over-throw al-Dajjal in the battle of 'Aqabat Afiq' in Jerusalem. Jesus will "kill all pigs and break all crosses", confirming Islam as the only true religion.
notice that each has their own version of we win, we rule.
August 10, 2009 9:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
BluePearl, thanks for this. I wasn't raised in a family that practiced religion. It's a perplexing subject to the uninitiated. It seems you've summed up some relevant points.
August 10, 2009 11:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Can we get our facts straight please?! If there is truth to what is reported, it would make George Bush a demi-godbuster, NOT a ghostbuster. These distinctions matter, you know.
August 10, 2009 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
You guys need to read "Family of Secrets."
W learned from his father long ago how to bury stories deep, so that a journalist or low level adviser would feel like they had uncovered an authentic nugget of information.
Bush might not have had the best verbal intelligence, but he was somewhat savvy, and was groomed by the best advisers money could buy.
He was the most successful president in modern history, when you consider both what he accomplished and how unpopular his agenda was in the peaceful, prosperous late 90's.
Remember when he got the "Bin Laden determined to attack within the United States" memo on August 6th, 2001?
Bush's reaction to the briefer was, "Okay, you've covered your ass."
He fucking knew.
August 10, 2009 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
hi i are a birthur an a tee bager an i don wunt no govemint takin over my moms medicare an ill be at the door wif my gun when the governmint boorocrat comes for her ochsygin tank.
AN HITLERY KLINTOON HAVES FAT ANKILS LOL LOL LOL LMFAO
August 10, 2009 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Also too!
August 10, 2009 3:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
We have a firm date on which the US stopped looking for Osama bin Laden.
We have a firm date on which the US stopped looking for WMDs.
For the record, when did we stop looking for Gog and Magog?
August 10, 2009 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bush=Gozer
"It's whatever it wants to be."
Watch and learn of the prophesy that was Ghostbusters. If only we had paid heed to the saga of the 4 horsemen back in the eighties, we'd have avoided all this mess:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfdiXBA7f6U
Now I admit there is much to interpret in this video scripture, but if Dan Ackroyd ain't playing the part of the aforementioned Congressional Democrats, I'll give you each a quarter.
Beyond the never-seen-again genius of Ivan Reitman, let's talk about NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, during an episode of which a piece of Skull and Bones Trivia was revealed. Namely that the designated nickname for he in the club with the greatest record of sexual conquest was, you guessed it, Magog.
And who, apparently, held that honor? Of course it wasn't John Kerry, and no it wasn't W. either. It was Bush Senior.
Maybe not Ezekiel so much as Oedipus.
August 10, 2009 11:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
RE: "This seems too weird to be true..."
MY COMMENT: To my way of thinking, it is too weird not to be true!
August 10, 2009 11:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
"When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion."--Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
August 11, 2009 10:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 25, 2011 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
couldn't it be that the white house's march to war involved a confluence of factors? couldn't bush also believe that he was going to defeat gog amd magog?
it took a lot of different folks with a lot of different agendas getting on board to march the country into that war. your storyline simplifies matters to make them more easily digestible but the reality is more complicated (and causes a much more troubling indigestion).
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April 2, 2011 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
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April 27, 2011 7:40 AM | Reply | Permalink