George Bush’s Morality

by Writer Team | April 29, 2005 11:00 pm

Standards for Measuring George’s Morality

By Dr Gerry Lower

Whether we measure the temperatures of a shuttle wing’s leading edge, the distances between a warship’s launch tube and a building in downtown Baghdad, or the molecular weights of chemical toxins in an Iraqi warhead (fictional example), we must have a reference point, a standard relative to which we make our measurements.

Without defined standards, we would obviously end up being all over the place, and while everything might have sufficient momentum to work for a while, everything would not work very well or for very long. This fundamental requirement of measurement is also true for human morality, of course, where we must have standards by which to measure the moral content of our behavior.

Without standards, we would end up just like George Bush the younger, able to rationalize tax cuts for the rich because the economy is so good and tax cuts for the rich because the economy is so bad, without bothering himself a whit over how this can hope to be logical, how this can hope to make sense to everyone else. In other words, George employs no standards at all outside of the rightwing political standard, characterized by religious absolutism and a self-righteous penchant for ‘winning,’ no matter what the stakes, no matter what it takes. George, as a ‘born again’ theist, turns out to be devoutly agnostic with regard to human logic.

More than anything, it is the absence of moral standards that defines the current Bush administration, that is, the people defining America’s current behavior in the world. America no longer measures herself relative to an agreed-upon, definable set of moral standards and we have, as a result, lost all reference points for judging our own behavior as a nation. Under Bush’s standardized rightwing dominion, no additional thought or input from the people is required. George sees the people as not needing to know the truth because, frankly, the people are just not up to the complex tasks which George and his cadre can so confidently confront. More…[1]

Source URL: https://www.newsinsider.org/97/george-bushs-morality/

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