The Patrician President Who Understands the "Concerns of the Common Man."

The president says he “understands the concerns” of common people. At the risk of using an already overworked term, it’s mind-boggling. In the face of megalomaniacal arrogance like that, even somebody as customarily facile with language as I am finds himself nonplussed. Speechless. Flat out of words.

But I’m a fighter (competition judo is my sport). I fight. This pisses me off so, I’ll try.

First, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anything as nonsensical or absurd as a man of the history and character of a George W. Bush standing before a presumably rational nation to say that he understands common people. How the hell would that be? Like a lap dog understands a pit bull? A canary a hawk? Maybe like Calamity Jane would understand Mother Teresa?

Mr. Bush, that’s not only bloviating bullshit demagoguery, it's an insult. There is no way on God’s green earth that a hothouse flower like you could ever have the faintest idea of how a thistle like me feels. You grew up (sort of – let’s just say aged) the scion of a wealthy and politically powerful family. A member of the nation’s royalty, you had unstinting and inexorable support at every step, during every day, and every trial. No one would dare stand in the way of anything you needed or wanted. You got the best of everything. You were not allowed to fail.

In fact, family money, prestige, and power got you out of scrape after scrape, picked you up after every pratfall. The same people who covered for you in school and business covered for you in the National Guard. You were ushered to the highest office in the land, where you now make pious pronouncements concerning character, patriotism, hard work and a grocery list more of things you have only literary and journalistic acquaintance with. Worse, perhaps, you now pontificate on geopolitical, military, and historical matters you have no way to understand except from the small amount of academic history you may have read.

Let me draw a comparison. I had poliomyelitis at five, recovered only to be abandoned first by my father, then my mother, then my grandparents. Drafted (shanghaied is the traditional term for what occurred) at sixteen by the CIA and military, I did criminal missions in Germany, Hungary, and “Finland” (the Soviet Union, actually). In October, 1960, my wife died. So did my daughter. In 1961, a couple months after my wife’s funeral, I went to Cuba with orders to kill Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. I didn’t – once getting there, I learned that everything I had been told was a damned lie.

Returning to the U.S., I faced not only $17, 500 (it was 1961, don’t forget) in debt, but a U.S. government determined to do everything it could to take revenge for my actions in Cuba. I paid the debt, fought back against criminal government, and I survived. I lost my two children to vindictive maternal grandparents and biased law, remarried and started again. In 1977, the United States attacked again, destroying my business, breaking up my marriage and family, and taking steps to assure that I could not return to business or gainful employment.

I fought back, I won, and I recovered. In 1980, I married again, started another business, and paid all the indebtedness resulted from the first U.S. attack (lawyers then cost $75.00 an hour, while those common people you understand so well, Mr. Bush, earned from $3.50 to $15.00 and hour). As soon as I had done that, the United States attacked again. They destroyed my business again, broke my marriage, ruined my credit and began relentless effort to assure that I could not do business or be gainfully employed. This time, they drove my teenage son to three attempts at suicide.

Now I really fought back. I bugged federal offices across the country, and sent the results to senators, congressmen, and the media. Result? You know damned well the result. NOTHING! The government will govern itself? The king will put himself in jail? Sure – just like you “take responsibility.”

Actually, there was a result. From 1986 to 1998, I fought skirmishes and fled federal goons as well as local, state, and federal law enforcement intent upon harassment or killing me on account of directives and public records falsified for the purpose by federal officials. In order to survive the criminal conspiracy on the Potomac, I lived mostly in the wilderness and off the land. I sheltered in a tent or rude huts and wikiup-style buildings built myself, or in a 1971 Ford recreational vehicle given me by a friend. I ate hunted and caught fish, fowl, snakes, and animals big and small. I dug tubers like squaw root, ground nut, and the like. I did odd jobs, taught judo and shooting, coached and taught school on occasion, and fifty things you have never so much as imagined doing.

You understand the common people. You understand their concern when they hear that you are bugging their phones, reading their e-mail, and invading their privacy at every level. Sure you do. Then why don’t you tell them the rest of it?

Things like how a guy like me – I don’t know anybody in a foreign country, much less communicate with them – can be stopped more - it took a while before I started keeping tally - than 109 times on the nation’s streets and highways? That’s in fifteen years. If we have a right to privacy protected by a Fourth Amendment obeyed by the government it is supposed to control, how can one man be burglarized by federal government more – after they got good at it, it became harder and harder to detect, even for the listening and recording devices I was forced to live with - than 60 times?

How does a man with the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” get wounded three times by federal snipers, rammed in his car, on his bike, and as a pedestrian by federal vehicles, and fight street skirmish after skirmish with “pull-toy” federal operatives? How does a U.S. District Court rule that for him to have federal records concerning him, “would irreparably damage the tax system of the United States,” and threaten national security?

How does a man lose everything he had worked all his life for, including his family and friends, to income taxation? While you’re telling us how you understand the common people, tell us about that.

A “pull-toy” (and “wind-up toy”) operative, incidentally, is one of the tens of thousands of people government state and federal lets out of prison on the stipulation that they do its criminal dirty work.

Mr. President, you are a patrician who hasn’t enough chance to understand the common man to make you blink if you got it in your eye. What’s more, your rise to power is symptomatic of a nation dying because such a thing is possible. While I’m at it, let me assure you that this common man knows you are a murdering predator, one who hides his wolf’s “fire and forget” behavior behind the “I understand the common man’s concern “ sheep’s clothing. You put mindless drone aircraft over other countries – and, one can assure himself, your own – in order to fire missiles into villages like little one in Pakistan.

You call the dead – women and children – “collateral damage.” That is how much you understand the common man.

Like you, your “War on Terror” is a cynical fraud. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and Abu Musab al Zarqawi and “terrorists’ in general are in fact allies, your excuse to feed the Brobdingnagian greed of the military industrialists who own you.

Sir – only a rhetorical device, I assure you; even the fact that I address a man like you is demeaning to one like me – the common man is not so stupid that he doesn’t see the truth behind “national security” that includes open international borders more than a thousand miles long and open, blatant encouragement of illegal entry. The common man would know also what is going, were he to know that government had the time, money, and manpower to relentlessly pursue another common man, one like me, all over the nation for decades.

While you’re telling them how you understand them, and how you are so concerned for their security, why don’t you tell them that?