George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

[...] With what perfect ease to the public does he manage the raising of troops, a business of constant and
extreme apprehension, without the consternation attendant on a levy! [fn 11 ]
All of this was written in praise of the regime that crucified Jesus Christ, and one of the
worst genocidal tyrannies in the history of the world. Paterculus, we must sadly conclude,
was a sycophant of the Tiberius administration. Some of his themes are close parallels to
the propaganda of today's Bush machine.
In addition to feeding the personality cult of Tiberius, Paterculus also lavished praise on
Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Prefect of the Pretorian Guard and for many years Tiberius's
number one favorite, second in command, and likely successor. In many respects Sejanus
was not unlike James Baker III under the Bush regime. While Tiberius spent all of his
time in seclusion on his island of Capri near Naples, Sejanus assumed day to day control
of the vast empire and its 100,000,000 subjects. Paterculus wrote of Sejanus that he was
"a most excellent coadjutor in all the toils of government...a man of pleasing gravity, and
of unaffected cheerfulness...assuming nothing to himself." That was the voice of the red
Studebaker school in about 30 AD. Paterculus should have limited his fawning to
Tiberius himself; somewhat later the emperor, suspecting a coup plot, condemned
Sejanus and had him torn limb from limb in gruesome retribution.
But why bring up Rome? Some readers, and not just registered Republicans, may be
scandalized by the things that truth obliges us to record about a sitting president of the
United States. Are we not disrespectful to this high office? No. One of the reasons for
glancing back at Imperial Rome is to remind ourselves that in times of moral and cultural
degradation like our own, rulers of great evil have inflicted incalculable suffering on
humanity. In our modern time of war and depression, this is once again the case. If
Caligula was possible then, who could claim that the America of the New World Order
should be exempt? Let us therefore tarry for a moment with these old Romans, because
they can show us much about ourselves.
In order to find Roman writers who tell us anything reliable about the first dozen
emperors, we must wait until the infamous Julio-Claudian dynasty of Julius Caesar,
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero and the rest had entirely passed from the
scene, to be supplanted by new ruling houses. Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 AD;
Caligula, his designated successor, from 37 to 41 AD; and Nero from 54 to 68 AD. But
the first accurate account of the crimes of some of these emperors comes from Publius
Cornelius Tacitus, a very high Roman official, and it appeared about 115-117 AD, late in
the reign of the emperor Trajan. It was feasible for Tacitus to write and publish a more
realistic account of the Julio- Claudian emperors because one of the constant themes of
Trajan's propaganda was to glorify himself as an enlightened emperor through
comparison with the earlier series of bloody tyrants.
Tacitus is important because he manages to convey something of how the destructiveness
of these emperors in their personal lives correlated with their mass executions and their
genocidal economic policies. Tacitus was familiar with the machinery of Roman Imperial
power: he was of senatorial rank, served as consul in Italy in 97 AD, and was the