(thanks to David Flanders for the tip….)
Former President George W. Bush charged $100,000 to speak at a charity fundraiser for U.S. military veterans severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, and former First Lady Laura Bush collected $50,000 to appear a year earlier, officials of the Texas-based Helping a Hero charity confirmed to ABC News. The former President was also provided with a private jet to travel to Houston at a cost of $20,000, the officials said. The charity, which helps to provide specially-adapted homes for veterans who lost limbs and suffered other severe injuries in “the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said the total $170,000 expenditure was justified because the former President and First Lady offered discounted fees and helped raise record amounts in contributions at galas held in 2011 and 2012…. “It was great because he reduced his normal fee of $250,000 down to $100,000,” said Meredith Iler, the former chairman of the charity. However, a recent report by Politico said the former President’s fees typically ranged between $100,000 and $175,000 during those years.
My generalized for disdain for Captain Codpiece © will come as no surprise to those who’ve hung ‘round my dark, dank corner of Da Interwebz for any length of time. Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © was Governor of Texas when I first moved to Houston in 1997; his unrivaled Reign of Error © during his time in Austin, as well as during the Presidency he stole, has been exhaustively chronicled. I’ll leave it to history to pass final judgment on Dubya, but I can’t imagine the verdict will be kind. This story only serves to cement my conviction that George W. Bush is perhaps the most clueless, incompetent, insensitive, soulless hypocrite to ever sully the Oval Office. That he would charge $100,000 to speak to a charity whose mission is assisting severely wounded veterans his lies and deception helped to create speaks to a level of tone-deafness and lack of regard that borders on monstrous.
So he gave Helping a Hero a discount? Considering that the war in Iraq purchased by his Administration’s lies and propaganda is responsible for creating many, if not most, of the severely wounded veterans, a reasonable person could be forgiven for expecting him to have the decency to waive his fee altogether. Then again, George W. Bush has never claimed to be a reflective or introspective sort. Sociopaths are generally incapable of connecting their actions to any resulting adverse and/or horrific consequences. He seems to feel no responsibility for sending young Americans into harm’s way in the service of a Big Lie (I’ll refrain from anything that might possibly invoke Godwin’s Law). How else could one explain charging a charity that cares for wounded veterans $100,000 (plus travel expenses) to speak at a fundraiser…when he should be standing before them and humbly begging for forgiveness?
To describe George W. Bush as a monster and a sociopath barely begins to explain his commitment to the lies and propaganda he and those in his administration sold us in order to get the war in Iraq they’d wanted all along. If there was any justice in this world, Bush (along with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others) would have long since stood trial and been convicted of multiple war crimes. Instead of giving Helping a Hero a “discount” on his normal speaking fee, Captain Codpiece © should be wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and spending his days in isolation working on his impression of Rudolf Hess.
One of the wounded vets who served on the charity’s board told ABC News he was outraged that his former commander in chief would charge any fee to speak on behalf of men and women he ordered into harm’s way.
“For him to be paid to raise money for veterans that were wounded in combat under his orders, I don’t think that’s right,” said former Marine Eddie Wright, who lost both hands in a rocket attack in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004.
“You sent me to war,” added Wright speaking of the former President. “I was doing what you told me to do, gladly for you and our country and I have no regrets. But it’s kind of a slap in the face.”
Though I’m thoroughly disgusted that Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © still walks the Earth a free man, I harbor no ill will towards the former President. It would be easy to hate him for purchasing an immoral and illegal war that sent almost 5000 young Americans home in flag-draped boxes and killed more than 100,000 Iraqis. As a leader/sociopath, he’s on par with despots like Pol Pot, Charles Taylor, and Bashar Assad. George W. Bush doesn’t enjoy the luxury of having karma on his side. In order to maintain while little of my faith in humanity remains, I have to believe that will catch up with him. In a just world, he’d be given a one-way ticket to the intersection of karma and schadenfreude, there to live out his days surrounded by example of the damage caused by his sociopathy and immorality. By rights, he should be serving time in The Hague as a war criminal, but President Obama long ago made it clear he has no interest in “looking back.”
Not many of us could be directly responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 human beings and the maimings of thousands more- not to mention the generalized long-term psychological trauma so many returned home with- and wander aimlessly through life as if nothing is amiss. Not many of us would think it appropriate to charge a princely sum to speak before a charity charged with caring for severely wounded veterans our lies and propaganda helped to create. Then again, most of us aren’t sociopaths incapable of recognizing the relationship between our actions and the consequences that flowed from them. George W. Bush appears to be a man with a clear conscience and the inability to feel shame.
That this is a sickeningly, callously disrespectful display of crassness and disrespect is self-evident. That it’s being roundly ignored by the mainstream media is every bit as distressing. George W. Bush is a war criminal who should be reviled and treated as a pariah. Instead, he’s still a free man seemingly devoid of the conscience necessary to recognize the death, destruction, and suffering he created.
Give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank. Give a man a bank (or, in this case, elect him President) and he’ll rob the world and be hailed as a heroic, inspired leader afterward…while believing he saved the world.
This is why I believe in karma.
