BushQuotes!

Chapter 5, pages 63-66: All of these pages are just a recounting of Bush's various business enterprises and partnerships while working in the oil industry that casually elides his corrupt dealings and repeatedly erases privilege with bullshit bootstraps narratives.

I will just skip right to the last sentence in this exhausting garbage chapter:

"I believe the best way to help American oilmen and farmers and producers and entrepreneurs is to open new markets by tearing down barriers, everywhere, so the whole world trades in freedom."

It is impossible to read that sentence and not see how the Iraq War was inevitable, because he cannot see the world in any other way than through the prism of his own experience, leading to dangerously simplistic views. He has no will, and thus no capacity, to assess whether other individual people have other individual needs. He merely seeks to impose on others what he (erroneously) believes was the key to his success.

Over and over, this book reveals how truly malignant unexamined privilege and its resulting void of empathy really are.

[From George Bush's A Charge to Keep, gifted to me by Deeky, because he hates me. In the US, all people who plan to run for president write a shitty book. (Some are less shitty than others, by which I mean the Democrats' books.) A Charge to Keep was George W. Bush's shitty I-wanna-be-president book, published in 1999. I am blogging one random quote per page every day until I have either made my way through the book or lost it behind a couch.]