George W. Bush Slithers Out Of Texas Underbrush To Remind Us War Is Awesome, Let's Have More

Of all the topics about which no one should give a shit about George W. Bush's opinion, this is high on the list.

There is one aspect of the current mess in Israel that yr Wonkette feels pretty sure we can all agree on, and that is that no one on Planet Earth needs to ever hear anything that chuckleheaded dry drunk George W. Bush has to say on the matter.

Unless he wants to surprise us and say, “Hey Israel, you know how I squandered any goodwill towards the United States after the 9/11 attacks by giving in to driving rage and fear and getting the nation bogged down in costly and unwinnable wars against a motivated and radicalized enemy, wars that cost us trillions of dollars and thousands and thousands of American and Muslim lives and took us 20 years to extricate ourselves from, a squander that will etch my name in history alongside other bastions of competent leadership such as Nicholas II and Jefferson Davis, and which I spend every waking moment of my life in psychological anguish over having led the world down such a path, I mean every single second I am consumed by grief and regret so enormous that it as if I have known nothing but darkness since that time before memory, so much so that I constantly beg my family to brain me with one of my golf clubs to put me out of my misery? You guys should learn from my example and NOT FUCKING DO THAT!!!”

Ha ha ha, as if George W. Bush could ever learn a goddamn thing. Or as if the bloodless politics junkies at Axios could resist shoehorning those thoughts in between sponsored content about taking bike tours of the fall foliage in Maine or whatever

So there was Dubya, on a stage in California in a conversation with Mark Updegrove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, and Lord help us, for a minute we were in our late 20s again, listening to that phony Texas twang yammering on and on about “cold-blooded killers” and dismissing what will likely be a very bloody infantry assault on civilians with an airy “It’s going to be ugly for a while.”

Hey thanks, Prime Minister Churchill.

The video is here if you feel like screaming into the void:

“My thoughts were that, uh, we need to support Israel, no ands, ifs or buts. This was an unprovoked attack by terrorist people willing to kill innocent people to achieve an objective. Hamas is a political organization; they do not reflect the majority of the Palestinians. And don't be surprised if Israel takes whatever actions necessary to defend herself.”

How this bit about Hamas not representing the majority of Gaza’s residents squares with Israel’s current strategy of not distinguishing between the two and indiscriminately bombing all of them right now, followed by sending in troops to engage in guerilla-style urban warfare against an enemy hiding amongst those Gazans, remains a mystery to Dubya. You’d think that after sending thousands of American troops to be maimed and killed in similar operations in Iraqi cities that radicalized entire generations of young Muslims against the West, the former president might take five seconds to contemplate possible consequences of this course of action.

But no, he’s still stuck on the same “we must kill the Iraqis in order to free them” mindset he’s been stuck on since 2002.

UPDEGROVE: And what does the immediate future look like for Israel in your view?

BUSH: Immediate future doesn't look very bright. Particularly if you're on the Hamas side. [Ed. Note: har har har herp derp, he made a funny.] But, uh, it's — yeah, it's going to be chaotic. And it's going to be — look, it's a democracy and in a democracy, the people's voices matter. And there's going to be a weariness, you watch, the world's going to be, "Okay, let's negotiate," you know, "Israel's got to negotiate." They're not going to negotiate. These people have played their cards. They want to kill as many Israelis as they can and negotiating with killers is not an option." 

It sort of is an option if you want to recover alive any of the Israelis being held hostage by Hamas after the attacks of last weekend.

"This is an unprovoked attack by terrorist people willing to kill innocent people to achieve an objective."

Again, this is nearly word for word something that Dubya might have said on September 12, 2001. It took 20 years and Joe Biden — who immediately lost the goodwill of the media and has never got it back — to end the war in Afghanistan. What gives yr Wonkette this sinking feeling in our gut is that our former president is encouraging Israel to respond the exact same way he did 20 years ago, because we remember well what kind of destruction and anger and suffering and societal upheaval that led to, even if he apparently doesn’t.

Ugh. Thanks a pantsload, Axios, for making us remember that this asshole is still alive and allowed to show his face in public.

[Axios / YouTube]

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