George Bush: The Sequel (Or: “The Rove Script”)

3000 dead americans? I’d read only something like 27. Saw 5000 missing, then 2000 or something, but how many of these are actual victims, and not just long lost relatives.
On a personal note. A good friends sister was there in Thiland, and left an hour before the tsunami hit to go snorkeling at a more inland bay, leaving her coastal house. She returned a few hours later, to see that the family and the house where she was staying gone, totally, everyone died.
Imagine how she feels, what a variety of emotions.

AOG,

I think there is a fundamental difference in the way you and I look at Bush.

You look at my criticisms as taking issue with his general political maneuvers. In that regard, I think you find me hypocritical for calling Bush out over “what every politician does.” That’s why you can hold up my critiques and compare them to particular actions of people like Kofi Annan or Clinton, and then ask why I wouldn’t hold others to the same level of circumspection.

I think you’re missing where I’m coming from. You can agree with me or not (and I know it’s perhaps more of a psychological take) but my problem with Bush runs deeper than the spinning of issues or the “business as usual” of day to day politics.

The reason I criticize Bush’s duplicitousness, specifically, is because I see him as fundamentally unable to relate to other people (including the American people) in any kind of genuine and/or empathetic way.
At the very same time, he has propagated an image of himself (the need to so thoroughly “construct” an image already evidence of his superficiality) as somebody whose character is based in compassion. (That’s why I hammer him for taking three days to respond to the tsunami. It was not because he was caught off-guard, like anybody might have been. It’s not even because he didn’t feel anything was wrong so much as the fact that he has a script he follows about being the most feeling guy in the world, and he stands before us, day after day, and has the absolute audacity to just read from it — in monotone.)

Of course, being a politician, I have already granted Bush the requisite room one affords a politician to be hard, to work the system, and to spin, spin, spin. There is no way I would take such vehement issue with him for this activity. Bush is going to do it, so is Annan, and so is Clinton, etc. Also, I’m not just being singularly harsh on Bush. I had all types of problems with Clinton and I can see all kinds of faults in Annan, as well. However, I could sense that Clinton, in spite of his weaknesses, and his spinning skills, had a much better sense of who he was (when he was on the job, I mean, which is where it mattered), and unquestionably had the capacity to feel what he charged with, and take a deep and genuine interest in the world. God knows Annan does too, given what he has chosen to involve himself with.

On the other hand, I look at Bush and I feel so sorry for him and for the country. It’s not that he doesn’t give a shit. It’s that he actively sought the role of leader of the free world knowing (at least at some level within himself) that he hasn’t (yet) developed the emotional capacity to.

We can argue about what kind of politician he is, and what kinds of political moves he makes until the cows (or the troops) come home. But, my problem is what kind of man he is, and why for God’s sakes he thought he had what it took to lead our people.

An even slightly bigger man would have been satisfied to become commissioner of baseball — which is where Bush’s heart really was before he fell for Rove.