corrente

The recent RNC-inspired flap about the Bushes and the Nazis is of course meant to discourage any real inquiry into the subject. I guess it must be a sore spot for them, judging by the howls of outrage ....

Fortunately, deviser of the southern strategy and recovering Republican Kevin Phillips does the research in American Dynasty (now finally on the shelves, for those who prefer to walk to their local bookstore). No irrational hater, he! The reviews say the book is rather loosely written, and indeed it bears signs of having been a little rushed into print, but the research looks good, and Kevin Phillips is about as mainstream as writers get.
From the preface:

In the United States, as we will see, the twentieth-century rise of the Bush family was built on the five pillars of American global sway: the international reach of U.S. investment banking, the emerging giantism of the military-industrial complex, the ballooning of the CIA and kindred intelligence operations, the drive for U.S. control of global oil supplies, and a close alliance with Britain and the English-speaking community. This century of upward momentum brought a sequence of controversies, albeit ones that never gained critical mass—such as the exposure in 1942 of Prescott Bush's corporate directorship links to wartime Germany, which harked back to overambitious 1920s investment banking; the Bush family's longtime involvement with global armaments and the military-industrial complex; and a web of close connections to the CIA, which began decades before George Bush's brief CIA directorship in 1976. Threads like these may not weigh heavily on individual presidencies; they are many times more troubling when they run through several generations of a dynasty.

We must be cautious here not to transmute commercial relationships into a latter-day conspiracy theory, a transformation that epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter years ago called the "paranoid streak" in American politics. (Try a Google Internet search for "George Bush and Hitler," for example.) On the other hand, worries about conspiracy thinking should not inhibit inquiries in a way that blocks sober examination, which often more properly identifies some kind of elite behavior familiar to sociologists and political scientists alike.

Since these people intend to rule us—that's "rule us," not "govern us"—forever, it makes good sense to do some research on them, ne-c'est pas?