Mark Medford - Why Can't W be a Man ?

Why Won't Dubya Apologize - Botched 9-11 info, two botched wars,
a gutted economy, global scorn. Why Can't W be a man ?

There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time sorry sorry sorry.

We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions on a daily basis because, well, we are just wired this way. Just ask Mel "Spurtin' Blood" Gibson -- I mean, how much more wrong can you get?

But then comes the hard part: We apologize. Profusely and maybe even a bit meekly, we ask for forgiveness or at least offer an olive branch and recognize our shared messy humanness as the thing that differentiates us from the saccharine sexless drone people of the world -- like, you know, Laura Bush. Shudder.

But then there's Dubya. He is, apparently, immune. He is perfect and flawless and without the slightest taint of guilt or error, and, despite looking like a bowl of Jell-O salad in a universe of divine tiramisu, he is, apparently, an angel of purity and light. It's true.
(snip)

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/04/21/notes042104.DTL&nl=fix

An inability to publicly admit error, combined with a readiness to blame others. Remember Bush’s mangled aphorism: “fool me once, shame on you – fool me, you can’t get fooled again.” The correct completion, of course, is “fool me twice, shame on me.” Mark Crispin Miller suggests that this flub reveals a deep moral defect in George Bush: an inability to acknowledge, and thus to articulate, personal error. Instead, blame is attached to any available individual – such as Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, and perpetually, Bill and Hillary Clinton. “The buck” flows unimpeded through and past the Oval Office. Buck-passing is not an endearing quality among the general public, which appreciates heart-felt apologies. Witness the public response to Richard Clarke’s apology before the 9/11 Commission.

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/weak-bush.htm

earth never to have sinned/erred. Houston, America, is it possible we have a problem here?