Bark At The Moon

From the incredible-yet-true file: Neil Bush, the one Bush brother who may actually be even more useless than W, is travelling around Asia with frequent Bush benefactor (and megalomanical distributor of thick envelopes) Sun Myung Moon. You'll never guess why:

John Gorenfeld at Alternet reports that the president's kid brother Neil has been traveling through Asia in the company of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah and sole proprietor of the loyal Republican Washington Times, promoting (ready for this?) a $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel"--51 underwater miles joining Alaska to Russia, perhaps to enable brother George to look more closely into the soul of Vladimir Putin.

Huh? A $200 billion tunnel to connect an uninhabitable part of Alaska with an uninhabitable part of Russia? Please. Either Moon is even crazier than previously thought, or this is the most retarded money-laundering scheme ever.

The Alternet article has more.

"Those who stray from the heavenly way," the owner of the flagship Republican newspaper the Washington Times admonished an audience in Taipei on Friday, "will be punished."

This "heavenly way," the Rev. Sun Myung Moon explained, demands a 51-mile underwater highway spanning Alaska and Russia. Sitting in the front row: Neil Bush, the brother of the president of the United States.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel" dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God's plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.

The name Peace King Tunnel would allude to the title of authority to which Moon, 86, lays claim, and to which U.S. congressmen paid respect on Capitol Hill in last year's controversial "Crown of Peace" coronation ritual.

Yeah, because the much more accurate name of "Crazy Motherfucker Who Needs To Do The World A Favor And Die Already Tunnel" just didn't have that same ring to it.

Moon is not a "peace king", and too bad those asshole congressmen who played a part in his creepy little coronation ritual -- in a federal building no less -- have not been kicked to the curb already. Funny how the liberal mainstream media just never manages to cover this stuff, as preoccupied with religious issues as they purport to be.

Message to Paula Zahn: if you ever get tired of covering the Weepin' Statue O' Sackamenna, or the worshipful coverage of the ginormous minaret in my pants, you may want to check into this one. A brother of the leader (heh) of the free world is playing footman to a lunatic who is going around shilling his lunatic idea. I fail to see how this is not news. I don't know how many times I saw footage of W's four-hour stay in Mongolia, drinking fermented mare's milk and riding his Big Wheel around the dirt road. Surely this other thing merits some attention from our journamalistic betters, no?

Finally, Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition brings the deep politics smackdown to this whole sordid mess:

Neil, we know, is following Poppy's lead: Moon led his father across South America in the mid-90s, stuffing a hundred grand in his pocket for his trouble, which naturally was no trouble at all for either man.

Also along for the latest ride is Washington Times President Joo Dong Moon, and that should remind us of the part the Moonie paper played in breaking, and then stifling, the Craig Spence White House call boy scandal that was linked to the office of Vice President Bush on this notorious front page. As I wrote last February, "did the Times initially play this story as big as it did in order to win influence? In other words, Look - we got the goods - what you gonna do about it? The Times said it had the names of Spence's clients, and that they included politicians, as well as military, media and business figures. Blackmail, it's called in impolite circles. This could explain why the scandal was made to go away virtually overnight, the names undisclosed. Because, they did something about it."

Given Neil's publicized appetites, it doesn't take a great leap of imagination, or even a particularly sordid imagination, to wonder what might remain hidden by a friendly publisher with his own intelligence apparatus and Asian power base. That is, assuming the Bush boy gives something in return.

The Moon junket isn't Neil's first unlikely foray into the politics of religion. He works Capitol Hill as a lobbyist for Scientology, and still needing clarity is the story that he co-founded a mysterious Swiss-based ecumenical foundation with the future Pope Benedict XVI in 1999. As I noted back in April Neil Bush is hardly regarded for his attention to religious causes, nor Ratzinger to ecumenism. (Also from the April post: "Curiously, the foundation is listed by Dun & Bradstreet as a 'management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research,' though an official claims the designation must be a mistranslation.")

There are several links in that excerpt, all well worth checking out, as is Jeff's blog itself. The main point here is the intersection between money, access to power, and the ability to stay under the radar of the intrepid news gatherin' folk. How Moon keeps on getting away with it -- a $200 billion tunnel under the Bering Strait commemorated to himself! -- is a complete fucking mystery to me.

Or not.