AP Photo / Doug Mills.

Seeing Dubya Double:
Are We Fatally Corrupt?

by Doc Cuddy, Editor

Examine photos of Dubya’s public appearances, especially those where he’s reaching out to touch the flesh of crowds. Though I have neither the expertise nor the software to prove the claim, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that his handlers are frequently using a double, a stand-in, a fake, an ersatz George W. Bush.

Study those pictures and either Dubya’s using incredibly heavy makeup, or the person we’re seeing is not really Dubya.

For me this possibility was the last straw. We’re already aware of the seemingly unbounded hubris of the man himself and those who shaped and still control him. We learned on September 11, from his scared-jack-rabbit hopping around the country, that he’s a coward. His bold, demagogic flag-draped posturing as the valiant leader of the "war on terrorism," always ready to put others at risk, is finally and wholly undercut by the possibility that he’s too scared even to mingle with his own citizens.

Given all we know about him and the system that created him, this should, sadly, come as no surprise. But the possible reality of a fake Dubya does reveal the depth of corruption to which we’ve sunk: a puppet president locked away safely, somewhere far from the madding crowd whose reaching hands touch only a puppet’s puppet.

Add this at the end of the long list of corruption:

and you are left wondering, at what point does the disease prove fatal? Is it too late to even think about a cure? Is it only a matter of letting the disease play out to its inevitable end of destruction and death?

The yelpers and whiners in politics, religion, and economics generally yelp and whine out of self-interest. The changes they want will enable them to get a bigger piece of the corrupt pie. They can’t see that their own blind self-interest is itself profoundly symptomatic of the disease. They think that changes can be wrought, changes that easily fit in the simple rubric "back to basics," that will give them access to wealth and power that they, as true believers, deserve.

Greedy? No, of course not. Their skins are white. They were born here. They deserve a place at the trough, or so they think, blindly unaware that the slop in the trough is rotten.

Where then is hope? Only in what freedom we have left: the freedom still to choose in coming elections those candidates who when in extremis will act not on self-interest but on principle.

As Lyndon Johnson sat down to sign the 1965 civil rights legislation, he commented to those around him that when he put his signature to the bill he was, he knew, signing over the South to the Republican Party. But whatever price he and his party paid, the bill was essential to the future of America.