March 12, 2008
Bush's Song and Dance
Last week our President tap danced for news cameras while awaiting John McCain's visit to the White House. Some thought it was funny, but all of us here at Dakota thought it showed poor impulse control for a head of state. This week he sang for the press at the Gridiron dinner. The man is a regular vaudeville act. Listen to the unconscionable lyrics. What is wrong with him? Maybe he's just happy to be leaving all this hard work behind,. or maybe he's happy to be starting another war. More to the point, what's is wrong with the sychophants yucking it up with him.
Speaking of the devil (it's just an idiom), Alan Brinkley reviewed Salon editor Jacob Weisberg's book "The Bush Tragedy" and concluded:
Is the story of George W. Bush in fact a tragedy? Many Americans, of course, believe that his presidency has been a tragedy for the nation and for the world. But Weisberg provides few reasons to think it has been a tragedy for Bush himself. He portrays Bush as a willfully careless figure, only glancingly interested in his legacy or even his popularity. “To challenge a thoughtful, moderate and pragmatic father,” Weisberg argues, “he trained himself to be hasty, extreme and unbending. He learned to overcome all forms of doubt through the exercise of will.” Tragedy, in the Shakespearean form that Weisberg seems to cite (although there is nothing tragic about Henry V either), requires self-awareness and at least some level of greatness squandered. The Bush whom Weisberg skillfully and largely convincingly portrays is a man who has rarely reflected, who has almost never looked back, and who has constructed a self-image of strength, courage and boldness that has little basis in the reality of his life. He is driven less by bold vision than by a desire to get elected (and settle scores), less by real strength than by unfocused ambition, and less by courage than by an almost passive acquiescence in disastrous plans that the people he empowered pursued in his name.
And while we're on the subject of bold vision, there are big plans for the George W. Library, Dan Froomkin points out;
The Washington Post editorial board writes: "Imagine a country whose leader collected huge sums for his personal benefit from corporations, from wealthy individuals with interests before the government and maybe even from foreign countries. Imagine that the leader didn't have to reveal anything about the size of the checks or their sources. If this sounds like some corrupt, second-rate republic, think again. It's happened right here, in the United States, and it may be about to happen all over again. We refer, of course, to George W. Bush's presidential library, which recently finalized an agreement with Southern Methodist University to build a library, museum and public policy institute there, at an estimated cost of around $250 million."
But enough focus on what we don't want, let's turn our attention to what we do want.
Photo note: The American flag in bad shape