Bush: Telling the truth, for once

Bush: War Boosts the U.S. Economy

Huffington Post: President George W. Bush argued in 2004 that the best way to grow the U.S. economy was by waging war, according to former Argentine Prime Minister Néstor Kirchner. Kirchner, in a meeting with Bush, suggested that the United States replicate the successful nation-building strategy it implemented at the end of World War II.

'And he stood up from his chair and got angry. He told me, 'A Marshall plan! No! That's a crazy idea from the Democrats. What needs to be done here, and the best way to revitalize the economy is -- the United States has grown based on wars,' he told me. That's what he gold me, Kirchner recounted. Bush added, said Kirchner, that 'all the economic growth that the U.S. had had, had been based on the different wars it had waged.'

The former Argentine leader, whose wife now heads the country, made the comments in an interview with Oliver Stone for his documentary South of the Border. The film is co-written by Tariq Ali, a British intellectual, and Mark Weisbrot of the Washingon, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research...

The charge startled even Oliver Stone. 'War? He said that?' Stone asked Kirchner, who was among a wave of progressive leaders elected in Latin America over the last decade. 'He said that, word for word,' Kirchner assured Stone... If Kirchner is accurately relaying the comments, that would make Bush the highest-ranking public official to state outright that war is and has been good for the American economy.

Robert D. Hare: In my book, Without Conscience, I argued that we live in a 'camouflage society,' a society in which some psychopathic traits -- egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, style over substance, being 'cool,' manipulativeness, and so forth -- increasingly are tolerated and even valued... Psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures. It is the egocentric, cold-blooded and remorseless psychopaths who blend into all aspects of society and have such devastating impacts on people around them.

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