Everything Bush did can be understood as either a calculated transfer of wealth to corporate interests, or a calculated move towards a totalitarian system wherein corporations (and their leaders) have rights, but not everyone else.

Fascism has become a meaningless term in the US, appearing in the mouths of politicians of every ideology to slander every other ideology. But it once had a meaning, explained rather well by Mussolini. It was the merger of state and corporate power, expressed in an authoritarian system. The fascist state exists to assure the uninterrupted accumulation of wealth by large corporations. Fascist states are aggressive for two reasons: to assure access to resources on favorable terms, and to justify draconian controls over the populace. Fascism needs enemies to exist, at least until its full panoply of controls is firmly in place.

Bush has been relentless in his quest to assure uninterrupted corporate access to resources both foreign and domestic, and he has used foreign aggression and fear-mongering to justify stripping Americans of liberty. On his watch, the government has engineered massive transfers of wealth from taxpayers to corporations: tax policies, bailouts, massive and expensive noncompetitive contracts with little oversight, deregulation of industry and regulation of individuals, militarization of police, giveaways of federally-owned mineral rights, the list is endless.

Because we have come to misuse the term "fascism" so extensively as a specious slander, describing Bush as a fascist no longer carries any meaning. And that, too, is engineered. We have been stripped of the vocabulary to describe and understand what Bush has done in an historical context. This is the source of the author's "mystery;" this is the reason he cannot fathom Bush's motives.

Capitalism tends towards fascism for a reason. Competition leads to consolidation, oligopoly, monopoly. Oligopolies and monopolies are powerful institutions, financially and politically, but they, like any business, need to continue to grow in order to show a healthy bottom line for their investors and owners. Growth in a monopoly is difficult, especially if government is hostile to monopolies. Large corporations must control government if they hope to thrive.

In a democracy, there are other power bases besides corporations. Fascists will always seek to disenfranchise these power bases, and we've seen plenty of that from Bush and the Republican party over the last 8 years. The Justice Department was politicized and set to the task of jiggering election results through selective prosecutions. Election processes were corrupted by Republican-led corporations. Politicians were bought - on both sides of the aisle; though not a new phenomenon, I think corruption of elected and appointed officials has never been so widespread. It's fashionable to hold Republicans to account now, but the truth is both parties have been largely co-opted by corporations.

The conversion of America to a fascist state has run into some snags, not the least being the massive failure of the Fed's monetary policy, and the war-weariness of the American electorate. But the motives behind the Bush years are by no means dead, nor is their expression in public policy.