You're Welcome America

I caught Will Ferrell's act on HBO the other night, his one-man Broadway show about George W. Bush.  I thought his performance was as significant for what he chose not to do as for his actual choice of material.  Ferrell avoided most of the easy jokes about Bush, the usual, worn-out ones about his malapropisms and garbled syntax.  There were a few of those, but where he used them, as in a sequence on the meaning of "where wings take dream," Ferrell used them to great comic effect.

Ferrell's best comic persona involves the projection of anger, as in one hilarious skit from SNL where he plays the part of a victorious political candidate who, for some reason, keeps running attack ads against his defeated opponent.  His mystified opponent takes to the airwaves to ask what's going on, and then Ferrell attacks him for "whining" and being such a "poor loser."  There is real menace in these portrayals.  So Will's choice of Bush as an alter ego is a natural, because Bush is the same kind of bully.  Ferrell gets inside Bush's head, somehow, and plays him as a man absolutely devoid of self-awareness.  Ferrell's Bush thinks that the completely trivial, mundane things he's saying, his patient explanations of the obvious, are important and, furthermore, necessary because it's unlikely anyone in the room can keep up with him.

The Bush Ferrell portrays isn't stupid.  His monologue is intelligent, coherent, occasionally witty, but the brilliant trick is that thing about Bush that Ferrell has isolated: he is a person totally cut off from the effect he is having on the public.  He just can't imagine that he could be wrong about anything, and it is this insulated, narcissistic quality that is the surest proof of Bush's mediocrity. Bush can't see that it is the combination of his unwarranted self-confidence coupled with his weird, skewed judgment that leads him over and over again into disaster.  At one point Ferrell goes through Bush's list of "accomplishments," from freezing up on the day of 9-11, through his Katrina non-reaction, to launching a war against Iraq on completely mistaken premises, to "destroying the world's economy," and sort of sniggers at the whole idea it's his fault.  He can't see a connection between this awesome list and the 71% disapproval rating he carried on leaving office.

Ferrell allows Bush, amid the frat-boy humor and nickname-giving shtick, a few moments of dignity, as when he talks about his feelings concerning American and Iraqi casualties in the Iraq War.  I thought the funniest moment in the show happened early, when Bush is out at the ranch in Crawford  (which he claims Rove made him buy so he'd seem folksy, but he actually hates it and prefers the "whites only" gated community in Dallas).  His brothers are there, and Poppy Bush too, and W gets them trapped in an old abandoned mine on the property.  At one point during their panic, Poppy gets frustrated with Bush and yells, "And why are you the only one in the family who talks with a Texas accent?  It just doesn't make sense!"

That was the thing about Bush.  Nothing about him made sense, including those 8 years he served as President, 40% of which he spent on vacation. I guess we can thank him for leaving and Bush, as oblivious as ever, will just say you're welcome, America.

Twenty Days of Bush

As I begin writing this, Bush has 20 days and 9 hours left.  While he has been preoccupied over the last month or so with environmental destruction of a truly deranged character (opening wilderness up to mining, for example, and Endangering Species already listed as Endangered Species under the Endangered Species Act), I suspect that the last 3 weeks or so are going to be devoted to business of a more personal nature.  To wit, undertaking necessary measures to ensure his own freedom from incarceration over the balance of his life.

One thing we know about Bush is that the outrageous does not faze him.  The commutation of sentence of Scooter Libby, for example, was so clearly a repudiation of his own pledge to deal harshly with classified information leakers within his administration that one might have been forgiven for thinking that even Bush, that most hypocritical and morally indifferent of men, would second-guess himself on that one.  No, he went right ahead with it.  He didn't even pretend that the putative reason given (the sentence was "too severe," although it was actually less than federal sentencing guidelines) had any plausibility.  He would have been content, I'm sure, to give no reason whatsoever.  I am virtually certain that one of the things he'll do during these last 20 days is to grant Libby a full pardon.

I suspect, however, that Bush is reluctant to grant himself a pardon, either through an unprecedented auto-pardon or by the Cheney Two-Step, where Bush resigns close to the end of his term so that Cheney can preside over the Bush Absolution.  There may, in fact, be legal ramifications to resignation of a President, even for so brief a period as one day, of which I'm unaware.  But mainly I think that Bush, who is in a curious way obsessed with his "legacy" (a narcissistic fussiness about his historical image), does not like the ignominy which attaches to so craven a legal dodge.

Which must mean that his Administration is actively engaged in conversations with the Obama transition team. The historical precedent is the Nixon-Ford "understanding" reached at the time Nixon resigned.  Ford, for the good of the country, would put it "all behind us."  Certainly, in the smoking ruin that Bush has bequeathed us there are plenty of rationales for getting things behind us so we can focus on pressing concerns such as our economic survival. 

In a larger sense, however, a Bush Auto-Pardon would contradict the reigning ethos of the Bush Administration.  Bush& Cheney are devoted to the principles of illegality without accountability; it is their credo, their calling, in a way.  The Unitary Executive was an exercise in lawlessness.  They were most at home with themselves when blatantly breaking the law and defying a prostrate Congress to do anything about it, which Congress never did.  Never even a successful censure motion.  Think about that.  With all we know about what has gone on, from the fraud used to sell an unnecessary war, to the lack of preparation and seriousness re: the attacks of 9/11, to the torture regime, to the warrantless wiretapping, to the felonious disclosure of a CIA agent's identity, not a single peep out of Congress.  That, more than anything, will be the the Bush/Cheney Legacy: a completely broken system of checks and balances.  And any act of contrition, such as that implied in a pardon, even if prophylactic, demeans this proud legacy of doing whatever they felt like doing. It would almost amount to some sort of tacit admission of doing something wrong.

It's a chancy play, an obeisance to vanity, but I think Bush will risk it.  He will sneer at Congress one more time by going "bare," leaving office with no pardon in his pocket.  It's probably not that great a risk.  Since the attitude of indifference is now so firmly established, since Congress, no matter who's in charge, seems institutionally incapable of taking remedial action, I suspect that Bush may safely forgo that final safety measure of complete executive exoneration.  He will strut out of the Oval Office one last time on January 20, having hastily signed a final batch of Executive Orders authorizing nuclear testing in ANWR, and oil drilling in Lake Tahoe, and head off toward the sunset in the West, to his strange retirement in Texas.  If he does things that way, I doubt that Cheney will get a pardon either.  It's not like Bush to be selfless.  He'll withhold Cheney's clemency out of spite, just to razz him.

Obama & Co will look into things, form a commission, let the statute of limitations expire, and that will be that.  We'll all move ahead as if nothing happened.  We don't want to criminalize, you know -- policy differences.  Or much of anything else, as long as it happened in the Beltway.  The true Bush Legacy is that the nation's capital has become an accountability-free zone.

America's Bush-Induced PTSD

Naturally, all of us here "progressives" (who may eventually summon the courage to call ourselves "liberals" again) are having a hard time believing that anything really good can come out of the election of Barack Obama as President.  I hear and read about it everywhere, this reluctance of good-hearted folk to take yes for an answer.  We're suspicious, wary, maybe slightly paranoid.  We startle at sudden noises.  It's difficult to sleep, we have intrusive hallucinations in which we wake up and discover we're still being ruled by an inarticulate little despot from the West Texas District of Connecticut. 

Okay, that last part is not a hallucination.  Bush is actually the reason for our national Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The Chief Dude, with his snarling sidekick Dick "The Dick" Cheney, absolutely trashed the United States. They hammered away at our self esteeem and patriotic pride.  They destroyed the world's finest legal system, left the economy a shambles, made the USA a feared and despised nation.  Certain tasteless jokes are circulating that with this big of a mess, naturally we'd hire a black man to act as janitor.  We are loath to trust The System to make any fundamental changes.  We'll keep both wars going, we'll maintain our various concentration camps in Guantanamo, Bagram, other black sites.  We'll keep illegally spying on ourselves.  Attorneys general with advanced cases of amnesia will say stuff like habeas corpus is not actually a part of the U.S. Constitution.  Joe Biden will refuse to comply with any Congressional investigations on the basis of a contention that the Office of Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch, nor the Legislative Branch, but is perhaps a wholly-owned subsidiary of JP Morgan Chase.

Well - time will tell, is all I can say.  Is the cruddy, dilapidated, depressed state of the Union the New Normal, from which there is no escape?  Will Barack Obama like all this "Unitary" power which Bush arrogated unto himself with the acquiescence of a prostrate Congress?  

I doubt it.  It's hard for me to imagine, for example, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would sit down with a cadre of warmongering thugs, like the Neocons, and concoct a pretext for invading a country as a means of ensuring their reelection in 2012.  While Bush has never had any compunction about killing all those American soldiers in the Iraq war, and refusing even to count the Iraqis who have been killed, a war which the editorial page of The New York Times called "pointless" the day after the election, I just don't think Mr. Obama thinks or feels that way.  Imagine the callousness it requires to kill people in a pointless war simply for your own aggrandizement.  It's mind-blowing.  Yet there it is; that's our current President and the way he rolls.  Whether we realize it all the time or not, we've internalized all that, we have had to come to terms with having a President who operates at that debased level.  It creates a dark mood which haunts every aspect of American life, provokes a cognitive dissonance in which we cling to old images of ourselves while trying to reconcile the actual barbaric and uncivilized practices of this Administration.  Torturing human beings, ruining the lives of absolutely innocent men, such as the Chinese Uighurs finally, finally released from Guantanamo Bay after years of completely baseless captivity, simply because Bush & Co. could not be bothered to institute a humane system for reviewing their cases.

No, I do believe things will get much, much better.  We have to understand, at a deep level, that the fundamental problem with George W. Bush was that despite his occasional displays of maundering sentimentality, at his core everything he did was anti-human.  Don't ask me why. Don't ask me why he actively opposed and worked against the interests of the very people who elected him.  But he did.  And his malevolence had a global reach.  He also did everything he could to interfere with any international efforts to ameliorate global warming and ocean acidification.  He tried as hard as he could to fire up the Cold War with Russia into a new conflagration.

I guess the psychoanalysts and the social psychologists would tell us that what we have here is a serious case of co-dependency.  Bush has been enabled every step of the way by the reflexive respect and deference the citizenry shows to the office of the President, never mind the flesh and blood occupant.  So we have accommodated his outrages.  Even now he's spending his last days in office doing everything he can to despoil federal lands by opening up pristine wilderness to mining and exploitation.  Why, you ask?  Because it's who he is.  Because he's the President, we look for excuses for his mania for violating us, abusing us, cynically using the military under his command, but there's really no excuse.

So after such a bad relationship, it will take quite a while for us to trust again.  Gee, maybe this new guy is the well-intentioned, humane, compassionate fella he seems to be.  We guard our feelings however.  We're not sure.  We've been taken for a ride before.

No Bailout for Bozo

(to the tune of "What Now My Love?")

What now my Prez,

Now that they've spurned you,

How can you lead

for another day?

What now my Prez,

Now that they've burned you,

Are you toast

In the USA?

George Walker Bush adds yet another distinctive PR (Presidential Record) to his astonishing list: the single largest single-day drop in the history of the Dow Jones Average - over 777 points. Sure, before he had already been the first president ever to institutionalize torture of human beings as official U.S. policy; the first to launch an all-out invasion on information that was one hundred percent wrong in every particular (that's the one I still think of as his Sistine Chapel ceiling); the first to forgive one of his own operatives for blowing the cover of one of our spies, even after the aide had been convicted of several felonies; the first to let an American city drown; the first to arrest, detain and deprive of all Constitutional rights American citizens apprehended right here on American soil; the first to run a concentration camp offshore so that foreign combatants could be tried unfairly; the first to knowingly and intentionally, even proudly, violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment against his own citizenry; the first to suspend habeas corpus other than in a time of war; and so very much more.

Yet some wondered if maybe Bush had lost his touch.  There was Robert Gates, who seemed kind of reasonable; the tentative deal with North Korea, even though it's now sort of eroded; a better job with Gustav and Ike than with Katrina.  Rumors circulated that maybe he was inching his way up toward mediocrity.

My own faith in W never wavered.  I knew he still had it in him, that innate capacity to fail, not only spectacularly, but in ways previously unimagined.  It's what makes him special.  He can screw the pooch even when the pooch doesn't seem like a pooch at all, but some other kind of weird species, screwing up even when his technique doesn't look much like screwing. That's how unique Bush is. This time around he lost his bail-out because the Republican Party in the House took a position diametrically opposed to his.  By a two-to-one margin.

Stunning.  Awesome.  Unforgettable.  Of course, one sad thought that occurs to me as I watch the Republican dissidents carried to victory on the shoulders of the Common Men and Women of the American hinterland.  What if the Democratic Party, at some point in the last two years, had ever found the inner strength, the personal resources, to tell Bush what to do with his Iraq War? They could have had their moment in the sun, and one that didn't run the risk of ushering us into Great Depression II.  Then I reflect, how probable was that under the anemic leadership of La Diva & Mr. Mumbles?  Not very, I guess.

But as for Bush: I still think he can do it.  Bankrupt the country and lead us into an economic abyss.  He doesn't have much time, but he's got something more important.  Talent.  A God-given gift.  I feel it, I guess, in my gut.

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.

In defense of my assessment of GWB's intelligence

I have been challenged by an e-mailer to defend my oft-repeated (okay, occasional and inconsistent) claim that George W. Bush is not dumb, and indeed my sometime and equally mysterious assertion that he is of above-average intelligence. I can understand the question. Listening to Barack Obama's masterful speech today to the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), I was impressed again at how strange it is to listen to an American politician who is not only comfortable speaking English but can risk forays into foreign languages. (Indeed, by the end of the speech I think his Jewish listeners might have been convinced that he was educated in a yeshiva and not in the rumored madrassah, and that his middle name is Heschel, not Hossein.) I would probably pay pretty good money to listen to Bush attempt "tikkun olam" (repair of the world), for example, which Barry handled perfectly. With L'il George, I'm sure it would come out "tickin' all 'em."

Which points out W's major difficulty, of course. He can't talk real good. Verbally he's subpar. It would be fatuous to deny it, although Bush would say it's "fat-you-us." So he sounds like an idiot, but I maintain (maybe delusionally) that he's not. He's clever. I base this on a few observations.

First, he's still President. When one considers how many serious infractions of the United States Code and the Constitution have occurred under his direction while he's been in office, this is no small achievement. Any one of his misprisions of office would have thrown a lesser conniver out on his can. Consider:

(1) It is now commonly accepted that he misrepresented the state of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, systematically and deliberately, declaring himself and sending his reps out to sell the tale that Saddam was absolutely lousy with anthrax, ricin, nukes, nerve gas, you name it. Huge stockpiles of ghastly stuff. Upon arrival in Baghdad 140,000 American weapons inspectors were unable to find a single thing. Not only did Bush not pause in his crusade, he escalated the war. And nothing happened to him.

(2) Bush's closest circle of advisors were involved in a conspiracy to reveal the identity of an American covert operative, Valerie Plame, a felony. The chances of Bush not having direct, personal, and contemporaneous knowledge of the involvement of Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove in talking to reporters about her work at the CIA are approximately .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%. He promised to get to the bottom of the leak, to fire those involved, to clean house. When it became public knowledge that his own lieutenants were among the leakers, nothing happened. He then set aside the one conviction resulting from the conspiracy and still nothing happened to him. He escaped unscathed.

(3) Bush freely admits that his administration violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), another felony, because they preferred their own methods to compliance with the law. Nothing has happened to him.

(4) Bush freely admits that his administration uses "enhanced interrogation techniques" which we and the rest of the civilized world know are torture and violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, and which constitute war crimes under the United States Code (felonies). Nothing has happened to Bush.

(5) Bush's closest advisors, including Harriet Miers, Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten, have been subpoenaed to testify before Congressional committees. They say they don't feel like it. Nothing happens.

Of course, this is a partial list. While all this has gone on, Bush has appeared at many press conferences, press "availabilities," and in other public situations where he has taken questions about all these subjects. He answers them, sort of, out in broad daylight. With truly scary facts working against him, Bush almost never says anything which makes his situation worse. Indeed, often he will invoke the war on terror or Congressional inertia to make the case that he's only breaking the law because he can't get any help in his lonely quest to make America safe. Which brings up his other gift, his ability to bully Congress into giving him what he wants: exonerations, hundreds of billions for his wars, whatever, all while working with the lowest approval ratings of a modern president.

It's worth noting that Bush's SAT scores in math were good, in verbal aptitude not so much. So he is adroit with what you might call symbolic logic, just so long as the language of such logic isn't in word form. I have thought that this may be a paradoxical source of strength. A President like Clinton, for example, was so verbal, so prolix in his expatiation on the topic at hand that he inevitably got himself into deep trouble. He just said too much in too many complex (though well-crafted) sentences, which, when reviewed later, contained too many contradictions. Bush sometimes runs on, but always within the confines of that meager vocabulary. He repeats, over and over again, certain thunderously obvious conclusions in that same dreary language. "Evil-doers who lurk." "Killers." "New democracy in Iraq." "World's a better place without Saddam." "Keep Iran from acquiring the know-how to build a bomb." "Before 9/11..." "After 9/11..." "9/11." "Let taxpayers keep their own hard-earned money." It's hard for Bush to stray away from his "message" because the words don't allow it. He has a general, clear sense of where he's trying to go, and he doesn't care if it sounds like page 3 of a Dick & Jane primer. Granted, it doesn't sound much like an intelligent man speaking, but you try it sometime. Commit all those felonies, all that deception, all those unconstitutional actions right out in the open, then conduct a press conference where you don't take the 5th and see how long you last.

A dubious skill, I admit, but a skill nonetheless. One that a "moron," as Bill Maher habitually calls him, could never pull off.

Puffy Parachutes To Left Bank of the Potomac

Rudolf Hess, who worked as Hitler's Assistant Dictator in Nazi Germany, veered off from a German airplane formation over the North Sea in May, 1941, and bailed out over Scotland. He was captured and held by the British as a probable spy, although the Germans disavowed him as any sort of agent. "Ganz verrückt," is how they summed up their feelings about Rudolf. Crazy. Hess's own story is that he wanted to meet with a member of the British royalty whose acquaintance he had made at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin to arrange an alliance to fight the Soviet Union. None of this saved Hess from trial as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was convicted and sentenced to a life term at Spandau Prison in Berlin, where he spent the rest of his long life as its only prisoner, dying at 93.

In other words, in more serious times decent people knew how to deal with political criminals who decided they might be on the losing side of history and fled to the opposition. What's done is done, the Allies said. Once a Hitler henchman, always a Hitler henchman. But thanks for dropping in on us.

Among the various terms of derision for Scott McClellan, my favorite was Puffy McMoonface, since it seemed to capture his essential ridiculousness. I recall him best as Bush's stonewaller during the Plame matter. Day after day, he stood at his podium and informed a nation curious about treason in high places that he could not talk about anything to do with Plame because "of the the ongoing investigation." Part of the ongoing investigation had been his personal conversations with Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, who assured him that they had had no involvement in leaks concerning Valerie Plame's CIA identity. This he dutifully reported to the press corps, since it seemed favorable to George W. Bush. When facts developed in the Libby case proved that Libby and Rove had lied to him (so Puffy says), he could not comment because of the ongoing...whatever. Investigation, trial, sentencing, exoneration by Bush, and eventually because of Puffy's own resignation and intention to write a tell-all book for big bucks. He couldn't detract from his own punch lines.

While McClellan's book is treated as a "bombshell" by the inbred culture in Washington, D.C., it is obviously nothing of the kind. Fortunately, the narcissistic reporters in the D.C. press corps have already read the book for us, looking for references to themselves, and so have divulged all of the parts worth mentioning. No one needs to read this thing now. Puffy does not say anything we did not know, as far as I can tell from the available hearsay. We all know that Bush lacks curiosity; that he's not "intellectual" in his approach; that he sold the war as a defensive measure against WMD's, but that the messianic purpose Bush "concealed" was to remake the Middle East (as the Neocons said at the time, in fact). We know that Bush is insecure and won't admit mistakes. We know, first and foremost, that he deludes himself, because he actually thinks he has what it takes to be President.

The one place where McMoonface might have helped the course of justice was in describing Bush's true state of knowledge about the Valerie Plame disclosures. He persists in the Official Story that Bush remained in the dark even though Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby, all direct assistants to the President, were not only fully informed but were the principal sources of the leak. This is highly doubtful, and I suspect McClellan knows it. The net effect of Puffy's book, therefore, is to give Bush a pass on a critical matter, one where serious legal jeopardy once threatened him. The rest is carping, a lot of adjectives thrown around for the purpose of impressing us that Puffy is an insider. Bush, as usual, will lose no sleep over this book. In fact, I feel reasonably confident that the "firestorm" of criticism aimed Puffy's way by the High Command was choreographed. It's part of the marketing strategy and a quid-pro-quo. Go ahead, Scott, and say bitchy things about Bush's complacency and susceptibility to manipulation. That's your opinion, and anyway, who doesn't know that? Just don't say anything that really matters. We'll attack you to help you sell your book and make you look like a "traitor" to us and a hero to them.

Scott's still playing the same game, in other words. Pretending to redemption, whereas his experience is redeemable only down at the bank.

Time to start holding our breath...

It's May now, and January, 2009, seems to be coming slowly into view around that far bend. It's a nervous time. I can think of historical antecedents -- concentration camp prisoners in Eastern Europe in March, 1945, waiting for the arrival of the Allies. Will they get here before the SS turn their guns on us? Dare we hope?

I think we've been very lucky since January, 2001, that an authentic crisis never faced the United States during W's shaky tenure as head of state. I'm aware of what happened on September 11, 2001, of course; it's not as if the President would ever let anyone forget. I'm thinking of a truly dangerous situation, one involving nuclear weapons, the kind of Cold War scenario depicted in "Dr. Strangelove." My mind recoils from picturing George W. Bush presiding over such a crisis. There is no doubt that he fell completely apart in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; he froze up, panicked, fled the scene aboard Air Force One. He didn't know what to do.

He didn't know what to do before it happened, either. Americans should be proud of the job their intelligence agencies did before the jets were hijacked and crashed into buildings. The CIA was on to al-Qaeda; its plot was part of the CIA's daily briefing to the new president in August, 2001, when Bush had already been on the job for about seven months. The FBI was piecing together the basic plot lines by observing what was going on with young Arabs taking strangely abbreviated courses in piloting jumbo jets in midflight. A smart, diligent, coherent president would have used that month's lead time to coordinate his intelligence services. Reading a headline like "Al-Qaeda Determined to Strike Within U.S.," Bush would have wanted to know every last piece of evidence and data supporting this conclusion; that is, he would have followed it up if he had been serious about his job.

Bush choked; it's that simple. Both before and after 9/11. I was thinking about that while leafing through Herman Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" recently. One of the pleasures of living near a University of California library, and paying that yearly alumni fee, is that I can delve into the enormous repository of information in those endless stacks of books. Kahn, of course, was the prototype for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," brought to life in Peter Sellers's masterful portrayal of the crazy genius of the apocalypse. Kahn, in reality, wasn't crazy or bloodthirsty; he was simply thinking about things other people didn't want to think about: what happens after a thermonuclear war? Is that it? Will the living envy the dead? Kahn did in fact (as George C. Scott, in a another unforgettable performance as General Buck Turgidson, recreates) present a chart showing "regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-war environments, one in which you've got 20 million people killed and another in which you've got 150 million people killed." Kahn was mordantly witty about some of the heat he took; in a later preface to the original 1960 book, he wrote that his critics almost made it sound as if a nuclear war was something Kahn found "desirable." Reportedly, he asked Stanley Kubrick for royalties from the wildly successful movie ("that's not the way it works, Herman," is what Kubrick allegedly answered). In his chart, actually called "Tragic But Distinguishable Postwar States," Kahn estimated that full economic recovery from a thermonuclear attack in which 2 million Americans were killed would take about one year. Compare this to 9/11, in which about 3,000 Americans were killed without any radioactive fallout, and the mediocre American economy wobbled back to its pre-attack state in relatively short order. Very, very sad, if you were one of those killed, or if you loved one of those who died. The attack has no other significance. The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, and with nothing special done for the next eight years, it didn't happen again until Bush decided to ignore the threat, which is what he accused Clinton of doing with respect to the 1993 attack and the bombing of the Cole. Then the same building was attacked again, and Bush, with way, way too much enthusiasm, proclaimed that America had found "its mission and its moment." Well, he did, anway. He would ride that hobby horse all the way to Kabul and Baghdad, without making the slightest dent in the "existential" threat of terrorism. The great irony is that terrorism, by its very nature, is so random and unpredictable that a free society will never eradicate it; but Bush was presented with an incipient plot which was so gaudy and elaborate that it could have been predicted and stopped. He was just absolutely the wrong guy to do it.

Herman Kahn wrote about a very serious problem, the most serious problem humans have yet devised for themselves. Then the Cold War ended and for awhile, at least, we have breathed a little more easily, thinking that at least the two behemoths of nuclear holocaust, the U.S. and Russia, are not going to do anything suicidal. Terrorism, meanwhile, will continue as the byproduct of economic disparity, religious intolerance and the general cussedness in the human heart. George W. Bush can play in his Arab sand boxes all he wants and it won't change that. He's been doing it for nearly two terms in office. Spending vast amounts of money, getting more Americans killed to pile on top of the dead from 9/11, of course, but not engaged in any sort of serious endeavor. The war on terror is a hoax. Something like 8 months to go, and then perhaps an adult can take charge. We've really been pressing our luck.

Staying Too Long at the Fair

I tried to warn W to leave when Karl Rove did, while the getting, while not good, was at least almost tenable; it's because, beneath all the sarcasm, I feel sorry for George W. Bush. I can't help myself - I'm simply a compassionate guy. It's along the lines of Atticus Finch's admonition to the children in Harper Lee's unforgettable "To Kill A Mockingbird." He told Scout and his son not to make fun of Boo Radley, and used the simile of killing an innocent bird to block any prosecution of Boo by the sheriff. What was the point of punishing Boo for his heroic act in saving Atticus's children from their tormentor? Boo was simple, in the sense the word is used in the Deep South. Not quite right in the head, but well-meaning. Like a dumb bird.

I know that there is something psychologically amiss with George that makes him appear indifferent to all his monumental screw-ups. It's an illusion. All his striving and ambition to live up to standards he perceives as the family destiny belie this casual disregard of his epic incompetence. He knows what he's done; his bravado is in direct proportion to the agony of recognizing he can't do anything right. Every sane person in the country whose salary does not depend on being a Bush partisan knows that he has screwed up in ways that are almost unimaginable, that seem the stuff of fable or science fiction. How can anyone surrounded by so many advisors, with so many resources to help with what is essentially a figurehead job, create so much destruction and havoc? He has broken the back of the military, the national treasury and now, at long last, the American economy. It's breathtaking, really. In a little over 7 years. And every single piece of the catastrophic destruction can be traced to a single cause: his phenomenally bad personal judgment.

It is Bush's particular form of genius. Forget all talk of IQs or personality disorders for the moment, as diverting as those can be while trying to solve the riddle of this strange and simple bird who has presided over the destruction of the United States of America. It is almost impossible to be as bad at being President as George W. Bush has been. Probabilities, aleatory considerations, the laws of chance, dumb luck -- these usually mitigate the effects of the maladroit. Not in Bush's case. "Call it," said Anton Chiguir in "No Country for Old Men," as he put his victims to the test. "What am I playing for?" the old guy asked. "Everything," Anton calmly answered. Every time Bush calls it he's wrong. Every single time, about everything.

He was wrong to ignore the al-Qaeda warnings, allowing the worst terrorist attack in American history to occur during his presidency. He was wrong to invade Iraq, the most colossal foreign policy blunder in that same history. He was wrong to declare "Mission Accomplished" at a ludicrously premature point in the war. He was wrong to persist in the occupation, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, thousands of American lives (more, now, than were killed on 9/11), and literally trillions of borrowed dollars. He was wrong to cut taxes and run huge deficits, wrong to run the national debt to over $9 trillion, wrong to mortgage America's security to an increasingly hostile Chinese government, wrong to allow Greenspan to create a Potemkin housing bubble with that borrowed-and-recycled money, wrong to resist the transition to nonrenewable energy, wrong to hamstring efforts to deal with climate change, wrong to introduce torture into American foreign policy, wrong to engage in routine violations of the Fourth Amendment against American citizens, wrong to hollow out the regulatory agencies to the point where Americans now eat downer cattle and lose entire cities to weather catastrophes.

Sure, I know. You think such effects can be produced through simple neglect. Not at all. However perverse it may be, this is talent, pure and simple. The merely incompetent could not produce the skein of catastrophes listed above. They are, for better or worse, the stigmata of a rare and perhaps incomparable gift. A man so lousy at what he does that it rises, in the last analysis, into the realm of art.

The Go Code for Iran

Turgidson:

The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir. "Dr. Strangelove," by Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick, et al.

Suppose, sometime in January, 2009, President Bush gives the go code for his 1,200 target bombing campaign against Iran. He doesn't ask for Congressional approval; at this point, Bush has nothing but wholesale contempt for both parties, and for the simplest of reasons: they don't agree with him, he's right, ergo - they're stupid. Apparently, the strategic planning for the Iran war has already been done. The targets are identified, although we can be sure, based on recent performance, that American intelligence is way, way off, and that many of the bombing sites will prove to be hospitals, business parks and residential buildings. Whatever. It's a TV show, not a real war, unless you happen to be within the blast radius of one of the very real bombs that falls on Iran.

If you look at sources like globalsecurity.org, one of those techie websites that look on with a barely-constrained fascination at American military might, you get the general idea that an American bombing campaign can't really start until we get about two more carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean. I know this bums Bush out, because it's such a dead giveaway. General Ripper, in "Dr. Strangelove," had the incomparable advantage of building on routine. The B-52s were always at or near their fail-safe points, so giving the go code, suddenly and without warning, guaranteed surprise and "total commitment." Sterling Hayden peerlessly depicted a general with a virtually foolproof scheme for defeating all safeguards while being absolutely batshit crazy. It is one of the most singularly frightening performances in the history of cinema, because General Ripper, you sense intuitively, is the natural and credible outcome of a system premised on an insane theory. If you want to defend yourself with men trained to respond affirmatively to instructions to destroy the world, then you must accept the certainty that among their number will be those who will be enthusiastic about destroying the world. Common sense tells us that is the case. And if they are enthusiastic, they will find ways to bring it about, with or without a direct order.

So even if Bush lacks all of Hayden's charisma, and, ultimately, his element of surprise, so that the bombing campaign over Iran will be his usual dreary and hamfisted exercise without the redeeming theatricality of "Dr. Strangelove," when he gives the go code without Congressional authorization, I have little doubt his orders will be carried out. On what basis would the generals say no? From a reading of the Constitution, which vouchsafes the power to declare war to Congress? That was forfeited long ago. From the War Powers Act? Bush has demonstrated over and over again, with the enabling casuistry of David Addington and others, that he will take whatever pieces of paper Congress has already given him and stretch them to the breaking point. Congress has given him two more-or-less open-ended Authorizations for Use of Military Force; Addington could find the go code in them with the papers face down and his feet on the desk.

As time has gone on, it has become increasingly apparent that Bush is as mad as a March hare. No one, maybe not even God, has any influence over him anymore. He's brought in a bunch of short-timers to nominally fill the roles of the original Cabinet incumbents, but they don't mean anything to Bush. Our warmongering, fiscally irresponsible President has run this country the same way he ran those few businesses he could get his hands on during his "civilian" life. Straight into the ground. He can feel it now. That familiar sensation of absolute, irredeemable failure. So he has very little to lose. The one constraining factor, I have always thought, is Bush's morbid fear of being tried as a war criminal. He's worked hard to maneuver his way out of that, probably the only disciplined and consistent course of action he's taken while President. He started with the Detainee Treatment Act and built upon it with the Military Commissions Act, two pieces of legislation which putatively deal with all these Afghans and Arabs the U.S. has rounded up over the last 6 years. I don't see any evidence either of these laws has anything to do with actual practice, but they were useful as excuses to pass exoneration provisions for violations of the War Crimes Act which might otherwise have reached all the way to the Oval Office.

But bombing Iran? That's not covered, as far as I can tell, by either get-out-of-jail-free card. An offensive attack against another sovereign nation in violation of international law. So I come back to the idea that serial pardoning will mark the final days of the Bush Administration. As for the 99,000 acre ranch in Paraguay, which some observers are convinced is at Bush's disposal -- it's kind of like that .45 caliber pistol which General Ripper reveals to Captain Mandrake by tossing aside a file folder. The paranoid believe in security in depth.

Our President and His Loyal Guard

I saw Mort Sahl the other night, the second time in five years or so I've been able to catch his act. I'm a lifelong fan, as you might expect. I think one of the funniest lines I ever heard was Mort's drollery during the Formosa crisis of the Eisenhower Administration regarding the disputed islands of Quemoy and Matsu. I must have been only 9 or 10 at the time, but I recall that one never heard Quemoy without hearing Matsu. Should mainland (Red) China have Quemoy and Matsu, or should Formosa have Quemoy and Matsu? Where was the United States on this issue? In those days we were staunchly in the corner of Formosa, of course, since everything Commie was evil, and there was no Wal-Mart to soften our hostility. Quemoy & Matsu were like Huntley & Brinkley or Procter & Gamble; it was unthinkable to uncouple them. So Mort had the answer: "I think we should give them Quemoy but not Matsu." I don't know why that's so funny, but funny it is.

Mort is cynical about all politics, so often the case with satirical thinkers, and five years ago he was a little contrarian where anti-Bush sentiment was concerned. The years between then and now, however, have won him over. He's become a superb Bush-basher. Bush has that uncanny knack; even the apolitical learn to despise him. Mort told a story about being invited by Alexander Haig, an old West Point buddy (yep, Mort Sahl went to West Point for a couple of years), to a fund raiser for Bush in Palm Beach. Bush's caravan arrived at the estate, a long dark phalanx of heavily armored SUVs, and behind Bush's own ride were a car full of doctors and another emergency vehicle rigged for onsite medical care. Mort didn't say much about it, he just reported the spectacle. But you know what he was thinking, along with the rest of the liberal crowd in attendance at his concert. All these extraordinary precautions, all this meticulous planning and preparation, all this government expense, so that the United States of America minimizes its chances of being deprived of the peerless leadership of that smirking specimen in the photos above. Because without that man and his incomparable intellect and character, where would we be?

W's Alternative Futures

John the Baptist, after torturing a thief,
Looked up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief,
Said, 'tell me, Great Hero, but please make it brief,
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'
-Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"

In January, 2009, the long travail known as the Bush Presidency will at last come to an end. The least interesting, and most grossly incompetent, man to serve as President in living memory will depart the Oval Office and will go --somewhere. He's probably not sure where. I would imagine part of his thinking, if that's the term, will depend on what Laura Bush wants to do at that point, including whether she wants to be anywhere near W. I would surmise that she doesn't. Enough, after all, is enough. If the BBC reports are true, Bush has resumed drinking; the reason suggested by the British investigative reporters (they still do that sort of thing) for Bush's absence with a "stomach ailment" one morning at the G-8 is that he was up late the night before slamming down etwas helles Bier mit Angela Merkel. There are pictures to that effect, dismissed by Bush flacks as nonalcoholic beer. But who would drink nonalcoholic beer in Germany? Angela, the physicist turned national leader, probably egged on the alkie turned world-stage fuckup. "Nur ein Bier, Herr President," she probably teased, seeking some way to steer her one-on-one encounter with this moron in a direction that would at least be perversely fascinating.

So it's possible that one of Bush's fantasies is to resume a true drinking life, and he's in the process now of reactivating his liver enzymes. Probably not, however, down on the "ranch." I think the ranch was a stage prop; most presidents (Clinton was an exception) need some private sanctuary with a pretentious name where they can go and "recharge." W is not going to hang around that place clearing brush and catching bass some Secret Service agent just put in the water, especially if Laura is somewhere else. One alternative future for Bush is to retire some place like Houston and live out a retirement reminiscent of a middle manager from an insurance company. I can't imagine he'll be "consulted" on anything; he's too stupid. The Republican candidates won't mention his name now, and he's still the President. So he'll drink, play golf and watch television. His days as Leader of the Free World will seem like a weird dream, as a life lived by someone else.

That's the optimal outcome for W. The alternative reality is where the world, including the United States, animated by a unmitigable revulsion, rises up against him. I can see that happening too. In that scenario, Bush becomes a criminal defendant, indicted either in U.S. courts or the International Criminal Court, for a long list of war crimes and atrocities. Bush, or his handlers and puppet-masters, have seen that one coming. That was the sole purpose of the exoneration provisions for torture and violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that we find enshrined today in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Indeed, with respect to the latter statute, we can go further and declare that the sole and only purpose of the Military Commissions Act was to insulate Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang from the truly scary implications of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, where the Supreme Court (even this Supreme Court) surprised the High Command with the holding that all these Arabs and Afghans thrown into Guantanamo, or into Abu Ghraib, and forgotten about were human beings with Geneva Convention rights! Ach du Lieber, as Eichmann said before his neck snapped.

Something had to be done. Not the right thing, of course. That isn't how Bush operates. The sneaky, cowardly, unprincipled and self-serving thing had to be done. Fortunately, Hamdan came down with a little time left on the clock for Bush's pet Congress over on Capitol Hill, time enough to neutralize some of Hamdan's more disturbing elements before a gang of Democrats descended on Washington, D.C. and foreclosed the option. Thus, all of a sudden, there in the fall of 2006, it became urgent to get that Military Commissions Act passed. I remember watching Bush on a television in the dining room of a hotel in Lyon, France, listening to his plaintive cry for mercy for America's torturers, who only forced glo-sticks up the asses of Afghan opium farmers because they thought it was the right thing to do. The idea of punishing these loyal American servants for just doing their jobs was "unacceptable," Bush squealed.

Well, of course the exoneration provisions went a little farther than that. Nested within similar get-out-of-jail free provisions found in the Detainee Act, like a set of Russian dolls, the new escape clauses essentially let everyone off the hook all the way back to September 11, 2001, and for some things all the way back to 1997, for anything except what was called a "grave" violation of the Geneva Act, and made acting on the "advice of counsel" a material consideration in determining whether anyone could be held liable for anything. You know, like Bush relying on Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo, who assured him you can torture the shit out of these Untermenschen because no law anywhere protects them from anything.

One thing's a cinch: Bush won't try to live in any foreign country after retirement, unless it's a place like Paraguay. An interesting question will be presented if the exoneration provisions are repealed: if, at the time you tortured or ordered the torture of a prisoner, it was a violation of the U.S. Anti-Torture Statute, for example, as indeed it was; and if that crime was later "exonerated" by an ass-covering piece of dreck that you ordered your Congress to pass; and, if further, at some point an enlightened and perhaps enraged Congress repeals the exoneration - well, does prosecution now violate Ex Post Facto? I think the right answer, in Bush's special case, as a Bill of Attainder all for him: let's treat this tricky Constitutional question the way Bush would handle it. Let's give the matter the same grave and serious respect which Bush has always afforded the supreme law of the land.

Bush @ 28%

It's still mysterious to me: who are these people who still support Bush? If he is at 28% approval, as the latest Newsweek poll reports, then maybe Bush is now down to his ineradicable base, the evangelical wingnuts who have flicked it in where life on Earth is concerned. Commander Guy still pulls about 70% approval ratings from Republicans, which strongly suggests that political and religious affiliations have entered into some sort of unholy matrimony in the reptilian brains of a large swath of the American population. I leave out the 1% or so of America's plutocratic class who like Bush simply because he doesn't get in the way of their unbridled acquisition of money. Team Bush, for example, is still researching global warming, while the rest of the civilized world has moved on to one of two positions: (1) frantically trying to deal with it, or (2) admitting that it's too late.

When I look at the photos above, I get the strong sense that Bush simply plays at being President. Long ago he figured out that the presidency was simply another in a long line of jobs for which he had no aptitude. It's always seemed ludicrous to me that politicians debate Bush's "policies," as if they were dealing with a coherent set of principles based on thorough analysis. They're nothing of the kind. Take the current tactic du jour of his Democratic opposition. They're talking of "de-authorizing" the Iraq War. Someone in the Democratic Caucus should read the original damned Authorization for Use of Military Force, October, 2002. It is, as almost all Congressional enactments are, an incomprehensible pile of bullshit. Nevertheless, the "authorization" for invading Iraq, for each and every point, depends on Saddam Hussein being in power. Nothing in the Authorization in the least grants Bush permission to engage in the endless "nation-building" exercise we've been enmeshed in since the Mission Accomplished speech. It's not a matter of "de-authorizing" the war; it's a question of pointing out there is no authority for what we're doing. None whatsoever. It is a full-blown Constitutional crisis (though no one ever talks about it) that the "President" continues prosecuting a war for which there is no legal basis, and if Congress were serious about stopping him, they could initiate litigation in the Supreme Court, hoping to slip it by the pervert/psycho wing of the Court.

So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we've got about 8 years to deal decisively with global warming, or the most extreme consequences will become unavoidable. The United States, of course, sits at the very center of the action plan, and the simian pretender pictured above sits at the very center of the U.S. We can't figure out how to stop a war which the vast majority of the American populace wants over right now. Which we don't need to fight. For which there is no legal authority. Which is bleeding us dry. And the same Congress is supposed to come up with an integrated, highly technical, comprehensive plan for averting disaster for the world?

Blooging Past Bush-Bashing

A remarkable feature of the blogging world is the unprecedented (as far as I'm aware) marriage of modern pop psychology to political analysis, particularly as it applies to that singular creature in the White House, George Walker Bush. I don't argue with the trend, and I've done it myself, though I'm careful to cite my betters such as the learned psychoanalyst (and Bush-Basher extraordinaire) Justin Frank, M.D. In essence, these analyses, or diatribes, or screaming rants usually conclude with a summary description of Bush that makes him psychologically indistinguishable from a serial killer. His ascribed attributes almost always include sadism and a more-or-less complete lack of empathy. For recent example, I offer Robert Foster Altschul, an instructor in literature at Stanford, who blogged on the Huffpost under the subtle title, "You're a Monster, Mr. President" (which a lit major would term "foreshadowing"): "[i]t is now undeniable that our country is being led by a soulless, self-adoring crook who cares nothing about average citizens, American history, or the rule of law."

The "soulless" part is the key. Mr. Altschul is a novelist and probably wanted to avoid clunkers like "empathy-deprived," but that's the drift. The idea is that Bush doesn't feel any sympathy whatsoever for the consequences of his actions, including pain and suffering. By now I think everyone but the The Thirty Percent (by the way, I think that's a better name for Pat Robertson's TV show than "The 700 Club," which, while very End-Days and everything, is a little obscure) would agree with that. The Thirty Percent are Bush's hard core, the True Believers, the Evangelicals, who don't care about the consequences of Bush's actions here on Earth because Earth doesn't matter. In fact, many of them probably believe that Bush is empathy-deficient (certainly not "soulless," however; Mr. Altschul, please: everyone has a soul). One of the great ironies is that our soulless leader is empowered here at home by the same kind of religious zealot who straps on C-4 and walks into a Baghdad market and self-detonates. Maybe it's not a giant leap from self-adoration to self-detonation. I'm just boogeying here, while blogging. Maybe that could be called "blooging." I hereby claim copyright, trademark and exclusive use for the term "blooging," although anyone may use it from now on through a free license, granted by me in perpetuity.

Why do bloggers keep hammering away at this? It's the result of complete frustration, I think, but here's the thing: it is in the nature of empathy-deficiency that a psychopath cannot be dissuaded from his sadistic actions, or whatever, through any kind of emotional appeal. La Diva Pelosi keeps talking about extending the "hand of friendship" and cooperation to Bush in defiance of this psychological truth. You are not going to cajole, or shame, L'il Georgie into anything. It doesn't work that way. Tomorrow there will be another meeting in the Oval Office where Bush tells La Diva and Mr. Mumbles the way it's going to be - fund my war or else. And the Dynamic Duo will keep hoping, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Bush will offer them some sort of compromise that will give them a way to escape the awful burden of a difficult decision. He will never, ever do that, because he has the ultimate leverage in negotiations. He just flat-out doesn't give a fuck. That's the big upside of a complete lack of empathy, shame, remorse or ordinary human emotion. La Diva and Mr. Mumbles actually care if the U.S. Army and Marines are placed in yet more jeopardy. Bush doesn't, not at all. If they die, they die. That's how he looks at it. Maybe 650,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of the invasion (scientifically speaking, that's the probable number). Bush doesn't care enough about them to figure out if it's true.

Interesting, isn't it, in a macabre, blood-curdling way? So you see, it's not that I disagree with the Bush-Bashing Amateur Psychologists. I think they're exactly right. I've just blooged beyond it. If they want to stop some of the worst effects of Bushitis, they can, but it's never going to happen by appeal to a better nature that simply isn't there.

A lesson from the Bard

"who steals my purse steals trash, . . . But he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, / And makes me poor indeed." Shakespeare, Othello.

Thinking way back, most of us can probably remember Bush in his 2000 campaign, wherein he presented himself as an honest cowpoke on his way to Washington to restore honesty and decency, a kind of prep school Matt Dillon who would make short work of all this Clinton-era lying and politicking. A mere six years and two months after his inauguration, the charlatan disgracing the Oval Office is barely recognizable as that simulacrum of common decency created by Rove's PR machine. Such startling reversals ought to make us deeply distrust a couple of things.

One is that bane of the McLuhan Age, the media artifact constructed from sound bites and imagery. For many Americans (though never for me), Bush's affected pose as a no-nonsense executive with a constructive agenda, and a low tolerance for partisan bullshit, closed the sale. Even his inability to speak grammatically correct English was seen in endearingly positive terms.

The second thing to worry about is not so technology-dependent. The Shakespeare quote above is from Iago, the arch-villain of Shakespeare's great tragic meditation on the nature of duplicity and jealousy. Iago - the liar, the manipulator, the wounded narcissist, the false friend, the betrayer - goes so far as to defend his "reputation" for integrity as his most valuable personal asset. Thus, to further his evil designs, Iago dons the cloak of the righteous as part of his scheme of ingratiation and betrayal, and the vain (and vulnerable) Othello buys it hook, line and sinker.

I suppose humans are simply genetically programmed to accept, at the conscious level, the superficial portrayal of probity and noble purpose. We want to believe it, and the pathological personality relies upon this human gullibility for the success of his schemes, which depend upon the manipulations of emotion where other, normal people use the honest attachments of emotion to fulfill their own needs. Good people do not want to live their lives in a state of guarded anticipation that some new acquaintance, a man seemingly so honest, so forthright, so well-intentioned, is actually a mendacious, cold, merciless, soul-dead conniver, with an anti-human and anti-Earth agenda, who takes pleasure in the infliction of torturous pain on humiliated enemies, who loves the sulfurous stench and bloody carnage of battle. How could half the American people get this guy so wrong? How could 30% of the American people continue to do so?

Well, it really did happen, right here in the United States. There's a line from another exceptional piece of art that's brought to mind as the end of the Bush nightmare hoves into view. In "The Lives of Others," the German film about the Stasi of pre-Glasnost East Germany, the persecuted playwright Georg Dreyer can at last confront, after the fall of the Wall, a Stasi minister who ruined Dreyer's relationship with the love of his life. After the minister callously brags about the power he once enjoyed, Dreyer walks away with the line, "And to think that a man like you once ruled a country."

The Desk Murderer

Paul Slansky, who writes occasionally on the Huffington Post, and contributes regularly to The New Yorker, is one of the more colorful and devastating of the Bush-bashers I've read. He really hates Bush, and you can feel it in such passages as the following from the Post:

"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.

When Bush is less than clear about dangerous things

The daily atrocities which Bush inflicts upon the English language should probably be the subject of an Amnesty International probe. He smiles idiotically while he's doing it, but I've never found it all that funny that the President of the United States has so much trouble with his native tongue. In his press conference today, Bush again reiterated our goal of removing nukular weapons from the Korean peninchula. I double-checked just to make sure, but the American Heritage Dictionary lists two acceptable pronunciations, peninsula and (sort of) peninsyula, but no peninchula. I've never heard anyone say peninchula besides Bush. We were always going to be stuck with nukular, but peninchula now also looks like a permanent fixture. It's unfortunate, therefore, not only that North Korea has nukular aspirations but that it's located on a peninchula. A double whammy which we don't encounter with landlocked Iran.

Whenever Bush can be the least bit technical, he's apt to reiterate the point over and over in a self-satisfied attempt to impress. He did that today with "Chapter VII resolutions" from the UN. I don't know how many times he said that, but it was a lot. Chapter VII resolutions are issued out of the Security Council in cases where a threat to world peace exists, as by an act of international aggression. Bush did not explain the reference to the assembled stenographers of the Fourth Estate; I think he enjoyed keeping them in the dark while he showcased his peerless mastery of the arcana of foreign relations. He got going once on "casus belli" in the same way; everything, for a while, was a casus belli. An impertinent question from the docile press corps might have been a casus belli in the dark days before the Iraq invasion.

Anyway, he preens when he can use this kind of insider lingo. Sometimes, however, I think he and Rove make something up just before Bush takes the podium and then the effects are less felicitous. To wit, “And I’d like to repeat, I do not know whether or not the Quds Force was ordered from the top echelons of the government. But my point is, what’s worse, them ordering it and it happening, or them not ordering it and its happening?” I'm not sure how a question which he doesn't answer can qualify as a "point," especially since it doesn't make any sense. I do know why he and Rove cooked this one up; a day before, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, admitted the military had no evidence the Iranian government was involved in arming the Shiite militia with IEDs. Bush, who had been busy pounding the war drums, skipped a couple of beats with that one. He needed some kind of recovery, and back in the Oval Office, just before Bush made his irritated way to the podium, they came up with that beauty.

I wish I'd been there, because I know the answer. It's much worse if the top echelons of the Iranian government are ordering the Quds force to cooperate with Iraq's Shiite militias. Much worse, since that might indicate a coordinated, officially directed act of war against U.S. forces. Gen. Pace knows that, which is why he said what he said. If we're dealing with rogue elements in the Quds force, or just Iranian sympathizers (using, for example, all the Iraqi and American ordnance we left lying around unguarded after the mission was accomplished in May, 2003), then Bush should (though he won't) rethink the position. For such "rogue elements" in Iran might be analogized to the 15 Saudi hijackers of 9-11, and if I recall correctly, the national provenance of those anti-American terrorists was deemed immaterial in our subsequent dealings with Saudi Arabia. So that even though the Kingdom is located on a peninchula, we left them alone, even as we leave them alone now, although we're aware that Saudi financiers send money and materiel to Sunni insurgents in Iraq who attack American forces.

Bush is not big on what you might call logical consistency, however. If he were, he'd be more concerned than he is about the close ties between Maliki's government and Iran, which came about because of Bush's overthrow of Saddam. So Bush is trying to work up a casus belli against the non-peninchula and so far non-nukular country which most strongly supports the very same government in Iraq which Bush is bankrupting the United States and breaking the U.S. military to defend. Iran, actually, might be seen as more of an ally than a nemesis at this point, but then the 2002 SOTU speech named the starting roster for the Axis of Evil, and Bush just can't let that go. Once you're on The List, you're on The List. That was before, of course, Bush was aware that the Muslims in Iraq were overwhelmingly Shiite, just like the Iranians, and it was fairly predictable that Iran's hand would be strengthened in the region by bringing 15 million Shiites to power in Baghdad.

This may account for why Bush is lapsing more than ever into incoherence, and has taken to posing rhetorical questions which could only be meaningful if he answered them, but he doesn't because he doesn't know what the right answer is. It must make General Pace a little nervous about his new job. The only guy smiling, maniacally as always, there in the front row with his nimbus of baby hair and lunar countenance, is Rove himself, fascinated as Dr. Frankenstein must have been. Just how weird can my monster get?

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.