On Veterans Day George W. Bush and his wife Laura were given the $100,000 Liberty Medal by Joe Biden at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center for their work with veterans.

You can’t make this shit up.

Lately I’ve come up with a modified Kubler-Ross model to cope with our fucked-up milieu. In my model: there’s outrage, then anger, then satire, then finally, acceptance.

For instance, if there was scintilla of justice, Bush, along with his neocon flunkies, would have been hauled before a war criminal tribunal, convicted, and be rotting in prison. There is a precedent. After World War II, Nuremberg Chief-Justice Robert Jackson stated that–“the planning, initiating and waging of aggressive war is the supreme crime against humanity.” 

Don’t be silly.

Bush is completely immune from any charge of war crimes. After all, he’s simply carrying out US foreign policy. If you’ll recall, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright informed us about the psychotic nature of these policies, we she stated “we think the price is worth it,“ when asked about U.S. sanctions against Iraq, which killed over a half million children.

Meanwhile, Trump has caused liberals to lose their minds, so Bush gets a medal.

See how I moved seamlessly from outrage to anger to satire to acceptance? You try it.

Anyway, it appears that Donald Trump has the amazing effect of sanitizing all that came before him. However, even corporate flacks like the NYT’s Maureen Dowd are starting to sound concerned that this is going too far.

“He’s such a menace that it’s tempting to cheer any vituperative critic and grab any handy truncheon. But villainizing Trump should not entail sanitizing other malefactors.

And we should acknowledge that the president is right on one point: For neocons, journalists, authors, political hacks and pundits, there is a financial incentive to demonize the president, not to mention an instant halo effect. Only Trump could get the pussy-hat crowd to fill Times Square to protest Jeff Sessions’s firing.

We make the president the devil spawn and he makes us the enemy of the people and everybody wins. Or do they? To what extent is lucrative Trump hysteria warping our discourse?”

Bush, it should be remembered, was the figurehead of the claque of neoconservatives who directed the military occupation of the oil-rich nations of the Middle-East, starting with Iraq, under the comical justification of spreading democracy. Looking back at the death and destruction, it’s hard to believe just how badly conceived and ineptly implemented their plan was. Indeed, the neocon’s long-term goals are definitely out of reach, and at this point their entire scheme–along with the US military and economic presence in the Middle-East–stands on the brink of catastrophic failure.

For all the disbelief and criticism of Trump’s surprising victory, the factor that seems to have been downplayed is that much of his support came from areas of the country that have suffered from the endless deployments. Trump repeatedly denounced the invasion of Iraq as a disaster and said during a February 2016 debate, “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

After 17 years of endless war in the Middle East, we are mired in more conflicts while the majority of the American population suffers from economic distress. It seems like no matter how much the establishment and the media choose to ignore the endless wars, they seem to go on and on and on, claiming more and more lives. But, here’s the thing. The violence doesn’t stay in the Middle-East. The recent shooting in California, close to where the wildfires erupted, was perpetrated by a veteran suffering from PTSD, thanks to his experience in our never-ending wars.

Lately, I’ve come to think that the conservative critique of political correctness doesn’t go far enough. The real problem is not entitled Gen-X students who get an award because everyone else got one. Instead, it’s our entire sociopathic elite cadre who’ve gotten awards, bonuses and lucrative paydays for fucking-up everything. From Bush and his Liberty Medal, to little-fucking-Timmy getting his big payday for bailing out the banksters, to Purdue Pharma marketing an antidote to their opioids, our feral-elite are the winners, while the rest of us are the losers.