WHY DOES BUSH GET ALONG WITH DICTATORS?

In a New York Times piece (October 12, 2004, p. A20), Condoleeza Rice notes that Bush “... has the best relationship that any administration has had with Russia... [and] ... the best relationship that any administration has had with China.”

Wonder of wonders! Why not? Putin, who’s now deeply involved in undermining Russia’s fragile democracy, was head of the KGB and Bush’s father was head of the CIA. Dictator love comes easy to him as long as the dictator likes him. Russia could sure use a George Washington now who would turn over power for the good of democracy!

My question is why does Bush have trouble with democracies like France and Germany but is comfortable relating to dictatorial types, either in opposing or glad-handing them? The quick answer is “Why not?” His religion is based on a dictatorial, murderous god who has condemned all mankind to die. He’s comfortable with that? Why not with any dictator?

China is led by dictators too. But, according to Bush, good dictators rather than bad dictators. How do Republicans decide between good and bad dictators? I think it’s all relative to them. They like whoever suits there purposes at the time. Liberals, who are a little more nuanced about these things, don’t like any dictators.


ESCAPE FROM THE BUSH MOMENTS IN LIFE

Eckhart Tolle says, “The tendency to escape is a form of collective mental conditioning that is at work almost all the time in people’s lives, not just when situations turn out to be unpleasant or unsatisfying or difficult. In ordinary life, there is a continuous moving away from the moment to an imagined future that is unconsciously regarded as more important. Most people make the present moment into a means to an end, the end being a future moment that will arrive a minute from now, or an hour from now, or whenever I ‘make it’.”

Tolle’s are nice sentiments to contemplate, but what are we to make of the consciousness of life which needs to be always “on alert” to the dangers which surround it? We’ve got this highly evolved system of warning that Tolle and others ask us to disengage and turn off. Can the human animal survive without it? Would those of us seeking inner peace find ourselves at the mercy of those who still aren’t evolved enough to seek full consciousness? I think I read somewhere that all of history could be seen as one civilization after another forming up and becoming soft, only to be overrun and conquered by tougher more primitive cultures who, then, also are softened up by the civilization which they conquer.
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"We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein logic."
—David Russell