a little teaser:
http://www.dubyaspeak.com/freshdubya.shtmlhttp://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050627/27bush.htmBush, The Spoiled Man-Child What causes the fall of empires? Why, stubborn leaders who speak like toddlers and never admit mistakesBy Mark Morford, SF Gate ColumnistFriday, June 3, 2005 Mark Morford
Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don't know all the answers, realize they might not've been asking the right questions in the first place.
Know what great leaders, great nations do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.
But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?
Here it is, another bumbling, barely articulate
press conference by Dubya, one of few he ever gives because he clearly hates the things and is deeply troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple mindset, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.
Go ahead, read the Q&A, linked above. It's sort of staggering. It's also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing, nauseating way.
Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding. Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly
random. Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.
He is, in other words, our downfall.
His
deeply hypocritical stance on stem-cell research that kow-tows to the deeply ignorant Christian Right? No real answer there. Doesn't compute. Just shrug that sucker right off.
Notice, when you read: There is no eloquent, deeply felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation, no passionate clarification. And there is certainly no reference to outside ideas, a confession that we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors, from science, from the wise and the experienced.
Bush is, of course, not talking to you or me or anyone with a remotely active imagination when he speaks at press conferences, or at his staged, pre-screened, sycophant-rich "town hall" meetings, so full of plain, everyday folk hand-selected for their blind love of Shrub and lack of ability to ask hard questions (read
this transcript of a recent town hall on Social Security, and come away stupefied at the man's shocking ability to appear just exactly as gullible and uneducated as his questioners).
He is not even speaking to conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans. He's certainly not speaking to highly educated people who harbor a sincere curiousity for and tenuous understanding of the complexities of the world.
Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing
Bushisms.
It's all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys and we are good and They are evil and that's all there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky polysyllabic questions.
Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe this is as it should be. After all, we are, by and large, a nation that refuses to grow up, refuses to take responsibility for our gluttony and its global effects, refuses to see the world as it is now, a mad tangle of interconnected humanity, a global marketplace, a hodgepodge of variegated religions all stemming from the same source and which therefore all require a nimble and nuanced and deeply intelligent leadership, to navigate. Qualities which our current leadership has, well, not at all.
The U.S. still behaves, when all is said and done, like one of those scared wild monkeys, clinging desperately to a shiny object
despite the trap closing in all around us, unable to let go of this old, silly, faux-cowboy mentality of boom boom kill kill God is your daddy now sit down and shut up.
What causes the downfall of empires? What causes the implosion of leadership, the slide of great nations into the deep muck of recession and war and mediocrity and numb irrelevance? That's easy. Stagnation. Refusal to change. Refusal to adapt, to progress. Refusal to grow the hell up, to take responsibility for our shortcomings and failures, as well as our successes.
Indeed, George W. Bush would make a great small-town mayor, somewhere deep in a dusty, forgotten part of Texas. His still-appalling inability to speak with any depth or resonance, coupled with his brand of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton worldview is perfect for some cute, redneck, tiny burg. It really is.
But for a major world power caught in the throes of a desperate need to change and grow and evolve, he is, of course, imminent death, leading us deeper into a regressive ideological tar pit from which we may never emerge.
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