The Weirdest Speech I've Ever Heard

George W. Bush does not have a shred of credibility left, but that does not silence him.  The only person in the country who doesn't realize how ridiculous his role as titular leader of the country has become is George W. Bush.  That is the secret of his deep, inner happiness, the happiness that drives so many of us crazy.  He keeps talking, still seeking to persuade, his narrow forehead crinkled, his dead eyes staring blankly, his immobile upper lip opening and closing like a tropical bird's beak, in the dim recesses of some hallway in the White House, where, improbably, surrealistically, he continues to reside.

Bush also resides in the Eternal Now.  There is no history for Bush; not even yesterday exists in his mind.  Only this moment, this moment where he is right once again.  The economy is going to collapse and we're going to go into a deep, painful recession, a Depression really, unless some financial legerdemain is played by borrowing a huge sum of money from foreign purchasers of Treasury bonds and giving the take to a group of Wall Street loan sharks.  That's where we are. And none of it, absolutely none of it, is his fault.  He didn't have anything to do with it.  He did what a government is supposed to do about business, nothing, and it didn't work out because business did not behave itself.  Now he is going to clean it up because he sees the way forward and everyone should simply do what he says or the Depression will be on your head.

I've never in my life seen anyone like him and I doubt that you have either.  

I think, after these eight years have gone by, with fewer than 120 days to go in this bizarre interregnum of idiocy, I finally see what Bush's gift for screwing up is made of.  It is no small talent. It is the lethal mix of intellectual limitations mixed with psychological and personality dysfunctions.  It works this way, and has probably always worked this way throughout his calamitous business and political career.  First, he makes a terrible decision, a really bonehead call, such as ordering a full-scale invasion of Iraq on nonexistent evidence that Iraq is any sort of threat to the U.S.  Next, all hell breaks loose as the consequences of his bad decision become apparent.  Bush is unperturbed.  It is not in his psychological makeup to discern any responsibility for a screw-up, ever.  While one might think that strong personalities around Bush could nudge him toward a saner path, to get the car out of the ditch, they cannot, not even Cheney.  Rather, Bush uses two other techniques to insulate himself from criticism that he sees, in any case, as completely gratuitous.  Number one is to fire all dissenters.  Goodbye Colin Powell, Treasury Secretary O'Neill, Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke.  The second technique is to use his abrasive and caustic personality to intimidate critics.  This defense is augmented by his control of the terrain.  He sets the ground rules for any encounter.  It is never free-flowing and unstructured.  It is one minute in the Oval Office where he demands an abrupt, 30-second summary of the critic's position.  It is easy for Bush to be dominant in such a situation because (a) he never thinks for a moment that he could be wrong, lacking all curiosity about the ideas of others and (b) Bush never allows the sort of logical discourse, the back and forth, which could pin him down and prove him in error.

So we have a profoundly limited man, bolstered by the sense of entitlement which his dynastic background makes second nature, exacerbated by an innate megalomania and density to criticism, and crystallized by his fundamentally lonely and isolated nature.  Thus we have the strange vision of this odd creature standing behind a lectern and telling us the American Dream is now over with just a few weeks left in his eight-year reign of incompetence, and never a single word acknowledging that he was President when it all died on us.  Such phenomenal obtuseness doesn't seem real in some fundamental way.  

I don't quite understand how it is that he's the President of the country.  It makes me think I don't actually grasp how images are created and idealized in the mass electronic age. How the consciousnesses of my fellow citizens are formed in such an environment. Whether the data overload of mass media has succeeded, in some fundamental way, in actually replacing the contents of consciousness with ephemeral imagery and prefabricated strips of language and slogans, so that rationality is not possible for vast segments of the populace.  Somewhere in the realm of my own ignorance lies the answer to the riddle of how such an unlikely cipher could actually ascend to the top of our government.  Yet there he is, yesterday, today and tomorrow. It's quite possible, perhaps almost certain, that we are living in a system that can no longer work.