"What's obvious to all but the willfully blind is that Bush truly enjoys hurting people. His every action is designed to inflict pain, from that loathsome habit of giving people nicknames - hey, media suck-ups, it's not cute, it's contemptuous, a bully-boy saying, "I think so little of you that I'm not gonna call you by your name, I'm gonna call you what I want to call you" - to the cavalier decimation of a nation. Bush's utter heartlessness is breathtaking, though no more so than the mainstream media's craven refusal to even acknowledge it, let alone to truly do its job and relentlessly point out every instance of his wanton malice."
Over the top? I think it's possible it is. I'm not emotionally inclined to give Bush the benefit of any doubt at this point; I simply think such descriptions, in a perverse way, give Bush too much credit. It ascribes a purposefulness and over-arching design to Bush's malfeasance that I simply don't think is there. The language describes a monster in the Hitler or Stalin mode, and Bush lacks the discipline and vision to operate in such a league. I think it would be fair to say about Hitler, for example, that "his every action [was] designed to inflict pain." A human being who establishes a goal of exterminating an entire race of innocent (and ethical, humane and unusually productive) people is a person of "breathtaking heartlessness." Hitler's decimation of the Jewish people was "cavalier," to say the very least; so was Stalin's liquidation of intellectuals, the religious and his political opponents.
I think Bush's "wanton malice" arises from an interpretation of the results of his carelessness and incompetence, and his general indifference to his performance and effectiveness, rather than from Bush's personal motivation to sow destruction. I don't think he cares enough to cause the damage attributed to his intentions. Hannah Arendt, in her consideration of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined an apt phrase for the "banal evil" flowing from the actions of a morally indifferent human. She called such a functionary, whose quotidian actions relating to matters of career or ambition inflict human devastation, a "Desk Murderer." She could not find in Eichmann the malignant heart she was expecting to discover. He was a man of limited intellect and vision who simply did what he was told, which was to work on the logistics of killing Jews, and gave the matter very little additional thought.
Bush strikes me as just such a morally vacuous and emotionally empty human being. His main career goal was to get elected President and to settle old Freudian scores about his wastrel young life, the failure to fulfill the promise vouchsafed by his manifold advantages of family and fortune. The actual "content" of his presidency (spreading American democracy in the Middle East, protecting Israel, whatever else he pays lip service to) does not matter to him. He demonstrates this indifference on a daily basis, such as his casual abandonment of the Mideast peace process. The true meaning of the Walter Reed scandal, where Bush "heartlessly" allowed returning veterans to be dumped in a mold-ridden hovel, is related to this carelessness, as is his "response" to the Katrina aftermath or to the looming criticality of climate change.
Bush is a trembling mass of anxieties with almost no internal resources for dealing with them. His psychological functions are devoted to maintaining his sobriety and sanity, and there is nothing left for dealing with "externalities." He doesn't know how to grasp a problem, dissect its details and formulate a solution. He's an empty suit and a Desk Murderer. Whatever their motivations, writers like Slansky make Bush, in a paradoxical way, much more interesting than he really is. It would be difficult to imagine a man with less on the ball than Bush. As far as I know, he never says anything interesting or funny. He doesn't write anything. I'm not aware of any intellectual interests in his life (classical music or drama, e.g.) or of any personal talents in the arts he has developed (painting, playing a musical instrument, woodwork). He occasionally talks about reading through a syllabus (Camus's L'Etranger, for example) that is usually covered in first-year university literature classes. There is no evidence that any of the "disciplines" he actually "studied" at Harvard or Yale ever inform any of his decisions, or assisted him in any way in his private sector "career."
The overreaction to Bush which we see in Slansky and many others is the conditioned revulsion which decent humans feel after too much exposure to an irritating personality. Without question, Bush is an uncouth, intellectually gauche, defensively smug jerk. Almost all Americans are very, very sick of him, but this is no reason to install him among the pantheon of great heartless tyrants of the modern age.
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