On a mission from Gog

The excellent muckraking website Counterpunch has broken a story (at least in the English language) that George W. Bush had a boner for the Iraq ground invasion because of a literal belief in the presence of Gog and Magog in the Middle East.

Apparently Bush told conservative French leader Jacques Chirac (a European conservative being a person who won't give you more than six weeks' paid vacation, and is firm on that) about the -gog duo, and the French government scrambled to find a theologian to explain just what the fuck he was going on about. Sometimes a simultaneous interpreter needs support staff...

If you think that's screwy, read the whole article for the high irony of its final paragraph.

Of course a million more people didn't die just because Bush is essentially American Christian taliban, although his millenialist sociopathic tendencies surely greased the wheels of the crazy train. And heck, certainly Reagan and possibly Carter (I wouldn't be too shocked if Clinton and Obama were on the list) also had a literal belief in the End Times, and soon. The fact that Iraq is sitting on a buttload of oil and oil profits was surely the motivating factor for most of the administration, Gog and/or Magog also likely residing in unmolested oil-poor parts of the same vicinity as the Land of the Chosen (Until Rapture) People.

Before we become too smug over not having the Bad Seed in the Oval Office any longer, at least Bush being a whacked out raving religious lunatic gives him some plead-criminal-insanity excuse for war crimes and subversion of the constitution. What's Obama's excuse for plunging us headlong into the Afghani killing fields (93 kids blown to parts on one day alone - nice shootin', Mr. First Community Organizer!) and occupying Iraq indefinitely?

You have to be insane to believe in Gog and Magog, but you have to be a heartless moron to believe in neocolonialism.