“The reason why I said that is because I remembered him talking movingly about his mother and the cross that she gave him that she had blessed in Jerusalem,” Bush told Hewitt. “Nobody knows that, and I never tried to make an explanation of why I said what I said until the book.”
In the book, Bush writes that he interrupted Putin as the then-Russian President spoke from note cards and “seemed a little tense.” Bush asked whether the story of his mother giving him a cross was true, and writes that “a look of shock washed over Putin’s face.”
Putin then told the story of recovering the cross from a house fire and said that when a worker found the piece of jewelry it was as if it was meant to be. Bush writes that he remarked, “Vladimir, that is the story of the cross. Things are meant to be.”
But in his interview with Hewitt Monday, Bush said that Putin was “emboldened” by Russia’s resurgent economic outlook – spurred in large part by the rising price of oil – and by the fact that the U.S. was increasingly becoming a debtor nation, financing both government and consumer spending through careless levels of borrowing.
The first item Putin raised in their June 2001 meeting, Bush said, “was about Soviet debt saddling the Russian Federation.”
“At that point, oil was selling for $26 per barrel,” Bush writes in “Decision Points.”
But in a September 2007 meeting, with oil at $71 a barrel and “on its way to $137 in the summer of 2008,” Putin began by asking Bush about the performance of Wall Street created mortgage-backed securities owned by the Russian government.
So, Bush and Putin understood a shared worldview and if you watch this video you can see Trump joining the pair to make a troika of common Gestalt and means toward ends. Only Trump delegates his Jesus patrol to Godfather Pence. And Pence gets a press clean slate despite lying like a rug right after the Comey dismissal when he had to know the actual truth but thought he could sell a full sack to America? Jesus blessed and forgave the liars? Those playing with a rigged deck? In which Testament? Which Epistle?
At about 1:40 or so into that video, "That's not what this is about," lying in full disdain of the honed ability of most Americans to smell bullshit when closely exposed to it.
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| I probably need Abigale Whelan to explain the bona fides of this man to me. |