Amateur hour in Washington, D.C.

"Why, Sir, a man who talks nonsense so well, must know that he is talking nonsense." Dr. Johnson, about 200 years ago.

I'm not so sure in W's case, although this may simply result from Bush's position outside the bell curve of normal human stupid-variation. He's always talked nonsense about Iraq. "It's the central front in the war on terror," "we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here," and so on. Always, always I get the sense that Bush, confined as he is to the emotional age he achieved before descending to the bottom of countless whiskey bottles, thinks like a 9 year old, and not like a precocious 9 year old. More precisely, like a 9 year old cribbing a social studies paper on Iraq from the I-J volume of the World Book Encyclopedia, circa 1955. What distinguishes the truly simple mind from the discerning mind is the inability of the former to think in terms of simultaneous complex variables, and the tendency of the simpleton to use "concepts" instead of "facts." Facts are hard to deal with, because you have to read, think and synthesize them into a pattern with other facts you have learned the same way. This is what really smart people instinctively know, and always do. They know there are never any shortcuts to understanding anything. Bush doesn't do things like that. He grabs at the broadest generalities he can find and settles there, permanently.

Bush began his Iraq war on the simple proposition that everyone in Iraq was an "Iraqi" who was a "person" just like every other person in the world, and all people like Western-style democracy because it's the best system. That's it. He started there, and he's still there. If you listen to anything he says about Iraq, that reductive nullity lies at the very root. Thus, he identifies the "enemy" in Iraq (as he did in the SOTU address) as a non-specific, freedom-hating killer. Period. The "government" in Iraq is not an Iranian-influenced coalition of Shiite parties in an opportunistic alliance with Kurdish leaders (the Kurds cooperating in order to assure their eventual complete independence in Kurdistan, with the inclusion of Kirkuk), but the "democratically elected government of Iraq." Thus, anyone not cooperating with this central government holed up in a six-mile fortress in Baghdad is the "enemy" who should be hunted down and killed, with the assistance of as many American soldiers as we can scrounge up.

I read other blogs, of course, including the big collating blogs like the Huffington Post, and where I probably part company with a lot of dissident commentary is in the ascription of cupidity to Bush, or the tendency to place him at the center of a vast criminal conspiracy with other Bushian malfeasors. I can probably be quoted to my own contradiction on this point, but I don't see Bush's awful incompetence, secrecy, and (in effect) evil-doing as primarily the result of bad intentions. Cheney, I see otherwise. There the charges of malice aforethought make sense. Cheney is an undermining force in American life with huge destructive tendencies. While not half as smart as he thinks he is, he's clever enough to engineer war-profiteering on an enormous scale and to play Bush like a badly-tuned violin.

Bush is not now, nor is he likely to become, Big Rich by Texas standards. He doesn't even have $100 million, the minimum "Unit" necessary to hang with J.R. Ewing and the boys at the Oil Barons Club. Cheney, on the other hand, has gotten very, very rich, and while he'll never live long enough to enjoy the bonanza he could have reaped after this Administration sinks beneath the oil slick of history (so many grateful CEO's would have crowded round), he loves that game of making rich people even richer, of basking in the reflected glow of other Insiders who love war and all the money it can make.

Bush is just a natural born screw-up, a guy who could never become a pro at anything. A permanent amateur, and not a talented one. I continue to think, as I have said before, that his presence in the Oval Office says something profoundly disturbing about the state of the union, and maybe what it says most of all is that the abandonment of the political arena by all the talented Americans who decided to make money instead left behind only two classes of people to run the country and take our money in taxes for their own use: fools and liars, and they're both in ascendance in Washington now.