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This will not be a blog entry about the hollow gestures, dumbfounding denials and cosmetic non-solutions jammed into George
W. Bush's State of the Union message on Tuesday night, nor about the sycophantic or hypocritical applause (depending on whether
or not a given applauder had actually drunk the Bush Kool-Aid) that so often interrupted the President's claptrap.
Danny Schecter the News Dissector has already, mere hours after Bush's address, done a bang-up job of editorially slamming the speechifying Decider up against
the wall with equal measures of outrage and humor. And scores of bloggers and columnists will quickly follow with deft deconstructions
of W's latest fact-free plea that we trust him.
So this will not be a blog about Bush's speech. I promise. To reverse-paraphrase Richard Nixon, all I'll say about that is
this:
Who the hell does this twit Bush think he is?
Most Americans, including W's own daddy (and the helpers recently sent by same) and a good chunk of his own political party,
no longer believe a word he says and are clamoring for policies diametrically opposed to his. His poll numbers are lower than
those of any president in recent history. And his response? In effect, "The hell with my country. I'll do what I want."
Look. I tend to be a political economy kind of guy. I don't generally look to quirks of personality as explanations for why
the designated agents of the ruling class do the things they do. But what are we to make of W? Here is a man who refuses to
listen to the best advice the ruling class has to offer on how to save his own bacon -- even when said counsel is gift-wrapped
by Papa Bush in the personage of the very savvy James Baker, who, you'll recall, brilliantly stage-managed the Florida brawl
that handed an outvoted Bush the presidency in 2000. We're talking raw presidential self-interest here. We're talking about
a way for Bush to avoid complete political disgrace. Wouldn't you think even a gawdawful stubborn fella would listen to good
advice on this subject? But not W.
We could chalk this up to stupidity, but we know that W is not dumb; he is simply crude, thick-tongued (see Mark Crispin Miller's
book The Bush Dyslexicon for a cogent argument that Bush is inarticulate only when he is trying to act nice), illiterate, and unprincipled. We
could blame it on the much-ballyhooed Bush Bubble, whereby W surrounds himself with yes-people and banishes truth-tellers,
but surely the blunt and media-blitzed advice of a Bush partisan of Baker's stature could not be repelled by the bubble alone.
So what is left as an explanation? Pure, unadulterated hubris. A hyper-egotism so inflated, so mercilessly adolescent, so
explosively averse to criticism, that it makes Richard Nixon look like Mother Theresa. Even the follow-the-money types like
me have to admit that in George W. Bush we have a true phenomenon: a representative of the elite who is such a bullying ass
that he will blindly scotch the interests of his sponsors simply to avoid admitting that he screwed up. He is a ruling class's
worst nightmare: a figurehead too proud to do what is required to save his own constituency from itself.
Calvin Trillin, who writes wicked political doggerel for The Nation, has a six-stanza gem, written from within W's
swollen head, in the January 29, 2007 issue. You owe it to yourself to read the entire poem. But here is a sample stanza:
I'll do what I want when I want to,
Though Congress's will may be foiled.
I've always done just what I want to.
You see, I'm a little bit spoiled.
I'm afraid that's about the size of it. With more than 3,000 Americans dead and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed,
multitudes more will die at the hands of a draft-dodging brat because he is, well, spoiled.
It's not the way one likes to see history made.
Okay. So I have written way more than I meant to about Bush and his stupid speech. And now it is very late at night (early
morning EST, actually) and I need to stop without having gotten to my intended topic: The article in Tuesday's New York
Times concerning the impending death of the American "public campaign finance system," and the incredible ironies to
be found there.
But that will be my next post. I promise. Trust me.
(Posted 1/24/07 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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