Character of G.W. Bush

[unhappycamper]

Character of G.W. Bush
David Bromwich
Posted July 13, 2007 | 02:11 PM (EST)


In his press conference on July 12, President Bush told the big lie yet again: "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th."

False but also crude, self-serving, easily exposed. Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia did not exist on September 11, 2001. The lie came eight days after a Fourth of July oration in which he compared himself to George Washington.

A few months earlier, he had listened with Vice President Cheney as the director of the CIA said that the Iraqi government was not built to last. The president's response was to consult with the vice president. Then he ordered his "surge."

It is time we got him in focus. He is not amenable to persuasion. He may signal a willingness to compromise, but he always goes back on his word; not charging himself with insincerity when he does so, for he means what he promises in some special, private sense: "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job."

~snip~

This president has lost contact with reality, in any ordinary sense of the words "lost," "contact," and "reality." We Americans are too cautious, too literal in our ideas of such irreversible disconnection. The truth is that people who are lost to us in this way can't be relied on to show it conspicuously. They may appear sober and friendly, on occasion. They do not froth and gibber. And yet they are not capable of curing themselves. Every bad new choice only deepens the rupture.

~snip~

They are gathering the forces now for Iran. The carriers on patrol in the Persian Gulf, the series of accusations that hold Iran responsible for the violence in Iraq, the propaganda corps at the American Enterprise Institute turning up the heat--all the preparations are in place in the summer of 2007, just as they were in the summer of 2003. An administration with a modicum of prudence would not risk setting the Muslim world aflame by carving up a second theater of devastation in the Middle East. Yet these are men of wild imaginings.


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