George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Teddy Roosevelt was of course a militant imperialist and empire- builder. The "Roosevelt
corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine is no corollary, but rather a total reversal of the
original anti- colonialist intent of Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy
Adams. Teddy Roosevelt's claim to exercise international police powers over debtor
nations launched a new imperialism, this time based in the United States.
Teddy Roosevelt was a dedicated Malthusian who did everything he could to abort the
economic development of the United States west of the Mississippi. This Malthusian
environmentalism lives on in the administration of the "environmental president." In
order to enforce his alien policies, Teddy Roosevelt was in the vanguard of the creation
of a US domestic police state. He got his start by leading police-state attacks on the New
York Tammany Democratic machine as New York City Police Commissioner, and later
carried his assault to other constituency groupings, the kind Bush reviles today as special
interests. Roosevelt founded the centerpiece of the US domestic police state apparatus,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and made Charles Bonaparte, a relation of the
French imperial house, the first FBI director. Roosevelt's program of "trust-busting,"
(which wiped out industrial forces opposed to the Morgan interests) and his
conservationism led to the creation of a whole series of regulatory agencies, which are
busily strangling US economic activity today.
On a deeper level: if London had not been able to count on the United States as a future
ally, it is doubtful that the British government would have encouraged Russia and France
to go to war with Austria-Hungary and Germany in 1914. Without the short-term
certainty of US intervention on the British side, the Bolshevik revolution would have
been far less likely. Theodore Roosevelt's role as the first overtly and extravagantly
Anglophile US president after the Civil War thus helped to pave the way for some of the
greatest disasters of the twentieth century.
Above and beyond all policy and strategic issues, Bush is attracted by the psychological
Gestalt of Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt suffered from a very limited attention
span. He was vain, self-centered, unstable and tended towards exhibitionism. The most
concise summary of Teddy's pathology can be found in a letter by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice
of the British Foreign Office, certainly one of the most important influences on
Roosevelt's life; some would call him Teddy's British controller. When another British
diplomat, Valentine Chirol, complained about Teddy's wandering focus and intermittent
attention span, Spring-Rice replied:
If you took an impetuous small boy on to a beach strewn with a great many exciting
pebbles, you would not expect him to remain interested for long in one pebble. You must
always remember that the President is about six. [fn 3]
This restless and distracted inability to concentrate, this incapacity for the prolonged
contemplation and examination of issues and problems, is one of the factors that made
Teddy Roosevelt the psychological wreck that he was. Teddy could not think; the
psychological background noise was far too loud. Instead, he was driven to undertake his