Bush's and Absolute Power

Absolute power doesn’t corrupt, as Lord Acton once supposed, but it does reveal character. In the case of George W. Bush, his stint as commander-in-chief has exposed the fact that the 53,000,000 Americans voted for a man who suffers from a glaring lack of substance.

Bush, when you get down to it, is a rather pedestrian character, but his privileged background has imbued him with delusions of grandeur. He does not appear to have learned from his failures, in part because he has never had to face the consequences of failing. Whether it was his alcoholism, his multiple failures in the oil business, or the fact that his father’s friends on the Supreme Court had to bail him out before anyone examined the ballots too closely, Bush is the kind of guy who always got promoted despite his performance, not because of it.

Lincoln suffered from depression, F.D.R. from polio, but George Bush is just plain insufferable. There’s no better example of Bush’s unbearable obliviousness than when interviewers ask him to discuss the topic of asking Americans to sacrifice on behalf of the nation during a time of war. Apparently, as Bush sees it, Americans are sacrificing too much already just by spending a few extra minutes going through airport security. Perish the thought that Americans might be asked to forgo their tax cuts or face a military draft.

One problem with Bush is that he cannot match means with ends. No doubt, this has something to do with the fact that Bush has always achieved his ends without having to bother with the means. For instance, Bush’s oil ventures kept drilling dry holes, but wealthy investors bought him out to curry favor with his highly placed father. Bush’s stock went up, even as his business ventures went bust. No wonder, then, that Bush has a sense that no matter how much he screws up a deus ex machina will intervene at the last possible moment to make everything right.

Bush’s shallowness is apparent in ad hoc style of his arguments. For example, at one time Bush vigorously rejected any comparison between Vietnam and Iraq, but lately Bush has been drawing analogies between Vietnam and Iraq to argue America cannot leave Iraq without creating a humanitarian disaster. Implicit in Bush’s argument, of course, is the notion that America should have remained in Vietnam longer, as if prolonging that mistake could have prevented disaster.

But Bush was against nation building before he was for it, so it is best not to scrutinize his arguments too carefully. Bush has always been a flip-flopper, but he gets away with it because he has no shame in accusing his opponents of engaging in the very tactics he employs. Bush, when you get down to it, will spout whatever slogan or line of argument he thinks will let him get his way. His Vietnam analogy is tailor made to try and pin the blame for losing Iraq on the Democrats. Bush was given virtually absolute power, but the only accomplishment Bush has demonstrated is his ability to skirt responsibility.

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