By Sherwood Ross
President George W. Bush is “the biggest thug” ever to occupy the White House, writes historian Michael Parenti, adding that most post-World War II U.S. presidents have also acted like “thugs.”
His “thug” list includes Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Conspicuously absent from his list are Republican Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Jimmy Carter.
What the thugs have in common, Parenti says, is their dedication “to a U.S. global interventionist policy” and support for “gargantuan, bloated, criminally wasteful military budgets” to execute those interventions.
President Kennedy “undermined the democratic government in Guyana and supported a lot of the counter-insurgency dirty works that were going on in Central America,” Parenti writes in The Long Term View, a journal of informed opinion published by The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.
President Johnson followed him, perpetrating “the first major escalation of Vietnam” and also invading the Dominican Republic “when it threatened to have a reformist left government that would take over and move in a democratic revolutionary course.”