Tony Norman: Have You No Decency, Mr. President?

[marmar]

from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via CommonDreams:


Published on Saturday, January 13, 2007 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Have You No Decency Mr. President?
by Tony Norman

President Bush is fond of making comparisons between his governance of the nation during the war and Lincoln's stewardship of the republic during the Civil War.
He believes history will treat him better than his contemporaries who are, after all, bedeviled by the excruciating reality of the here-and-now.

Two nights ago while pleading with the nation to give his failed Iraq policies a chance to succeed by yet another infusion of blood and treasure, Mr. Bush assumed a haunted countenance.

Perhaps he found himself transported to Lincoln's era in a blaze of terrible insight. Perhaps he finally saw his own John Wilkes Booth lurking in the shadows of Ford's Theater waiting to ambush him.

If we're lucky, the fear in Mr. Bush's eyes was the faint glimmer of a conscience finally kicking in -- a belated but dim realization of the sacrifice he has asked the nation to assume until the next president takes the oath of office in January 2009.

He sounded unusually flat. Mr. Bush knew he was cornered between the exigencies of fate and his own hubris.

His grudging acknowledgment that "mistakes were made" is the kind of Nixonian passive construction that points to an intense desire to escape responsibility for his own policies.

At the lowest point of his presidency, Mr. Bush refuses to even fake the kind of self-criticism that other presidents have routinely resorted to in their search for redemption.

Lincoln knew all about being self-critical in public. He was a melancholic but thoughtful man who constantly weighed the implications of his decisions for both his nation in the midst of a brutal civil war and the ruthless judgment of history in its aftermath.

Lincoln is our greatest president because he told himself the truth about what his decisions meant for the country.

By comparison, Mr. Bush has yet to exhibit anything resembling deep empathy or soul-searching regarding the Iraq war.

Mr. Bush's rationale for an expansion of our military commitment is built upon the kind of abstraction that sent us searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction in the first place.

The blood spilled every day in Iraq isn't abstract. While most citizens are too polite to say it, Mr. Bush's preemptive "war against terror" killed more Americans than al-Qaida did on Sept. 11. ......(more)

The rest of the article is at: http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0113-24.htm

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. He asks: "Are you listening, Mr. President?"

The answer is 'no'. Listening is what Bush does worst. Even more so than thinking, or judging. Or running anything. It's because he doesn't listen to anyone with different views from himself that he's bad at all of the preceding.