The Worst Possible President (great essay by Jane Smiley)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/not-only-the-worst-presid_b_38703.html

SNIP

How do you build yourself a madman? Well, first you flatter him, and then you try never to make him angry, and then you feed him ideas that flatter him even more by making him seem to himself sentimentally visionary and powerful and righteous. You appeal to his already evident mean streak and his hot temper by reminding him all the time that he has enemies, and you cultivate his religious side so that the sense of righteous victimization inherent in extreme religion comes out. If he were not already an ignorant, dependant, fragile, and rigid person, he would not be susceptible to this sort of conditioning, but by temperament and practice, he has nothing of his own to counter your efforts. Then you hire a few shyster-sycophants like John Yoo to tell him (ignorant as he is, with no actual understanding of the Constitution), that as president he can do whatever he wants.

So, here he is, Little George, caught between the devil (Cheney) and the deep blue sea (fifty-some years of being infantilized by B/S/B). Cheney and Rumsfeld, aided by Rice and Miers and Hughes, convince him that his masculinity will only be enhanced by doing all the masculine things he missed out on over the years, especially making war. And Gerson gives his war a virtuous, godly gloss. And Gerson's words come out of his mouth so often that he believes them and thinks they are his. In the meantime, Karl Rove continues to think that he is the maestro, playing Little George (and his base and the rest of the nation) like his own personal piano. Playing the president, for Rove, means enhancing LIttle George's actual dependency while encouraging him to think that he's the boss (allowing him to call you "Turdblossom", for example, and isn't it telling that "turd" seems to be Bush's favorite imprecation, rather than, say, "fuck"?).

Bush is the worst possible president because he is simultaneously unusually ignorant for a president and unusually shallow, as well as desperate for a success he can call his own. I can see how in a certain sort of era--say an era of prosperity and world peace (can you think of one? I can't) an unusually ignorant and shallow man could bump along in the presidency for a few years without creating havoc and destruction, but these years didn't happen to be peaceful and prosperous, they happened to be delicate and dangerous. Clinton knew that, and he approached his compromising and self-contradictory foreign policy tasks with care. But Bush and his fellow boors were so blind that they adopted as their motto "anything but Clinton", sheer contrarianism and resentment. It wasn't enough to them for the US to be powerful, as it was in the Clinton years, or to be generally respected and appreciated--they wanted something more sensational--power they could feel, power that was erotic and fetishistic, power that was uncomfortable for others, power that would make them feel big by making others feel small, power that would show Clinton up. . . .

SNIP

:wow:

Her political writing is excellent, as well. She is always spot on.

while I was waiting for one of my children to have some minor (to anyone except a parent) surgery. It's what got me through it. . .

She IS a wonderful writer.

Both Smiley & I spent the 80s at Iowa State; reading the book brought back lots of memories.

Go to Huffington and read the whole thing. A scathing unpacking of our national nightmare, by a great writer at the top of her game.

She's fantastic, isn't she?

She's a regular there.

"If he were not already an ignorant, dependant, fragile, and rigid person, he would not be susceptible to this sort of conditioning..."

:rofl:

"Little George isn't the same guy he was in 2000, the guy described by Gail Sheehy in her Vanity Fair profile--hyper-competitive and dyslexic, prone to cheat at games, always swinging between screwing up and making up, hating criticism and disagreement, careless of others but often charming. He is no longer the guy who the Republicans thought they could control (unlike, say, McCain). The small pathologies of Bush the candidate have, thanks to the purposes of the neocons and the religious right, been enhanced and upgraded. We have a bona fide madman now, who thinks of himself in a grandiose way as single-handedly turning the tide of history. "

That is a must read, as is almost all of Smiley's political stuff. Great post!

Among other good writers.

But IMO, she's one of the very top.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16155.htm

Our imperial leader, an impish little man with clear sociopathic symptoms, is incapable of empathy for the struggles of the common people, as those born into wealth and privilege often are. The man with his finger on the nuclear detonator is mentally ill, incapable of remorse—a fact that should terrify every world citizen. I do not say this out of malice or to demean the president; it is simply a statement of fact based upon quantifiable evidence that any student of psychology would easily recognize.

The fact that such a misfit could ascend to the presidency is testimony to the effectiveness of the capital system. Under capitalism, political power is not derived from the people, as would be the case in a democracy; nor does it not flow from the bottom up—it matriculates from the top down. It is really quite simple: The men and women who are in office were put there by people with immense wealth to represent the interests of the wealthy, to make money for them. And that is exactly what they are doing.

In many ways, George W. Bush is the perfect man for the job, if one understands what his real work entails as an emissary of the ruling class. He possesses all of the qualifications the vocation requires: callousness and indifference to the needs of others, the absence of conscience, truncated mental capacity; the inability to reason and to analyze; the incapacity to admit wrong doing; a penchant for cruelty that includes the enjoyment of inflicting pain and torture on others, as well as a powerful sense of nobility and entitlement that stems from being born into wealth and privilege. He is also a pathological liar.

From the president’s sickly perspective, the admission of failure is equivalent to a declaration of weakness and indecision, which explains his inability to change course, even if it means the destruction of America. Thus he has no guilt about sending thousands more men and women to kill and die in Iraq. You see, the president’s mind is defective. It does not work like the minds of normal human beings.

Corporate America placed George W. Bush in the White House to wage endless war; to bankrupt the federal treasury to the extent that few social programs will survive, and virtually all of our tax dollars will go into supporting the military industrial complex. The people who put him in office intend to end public ownership of the commons, as well as all government programs that do not directly benefit the wealthy.

Let me clarify what this entails. If Bush and his handlers prevail in the class struggle, all social programs of value to the middle class and the poor, including Social Security, will be privatized and run for profit. The National Parks, National Forests, and all public lands will be privatized, and divvied up to private vendors such as the Disney Corporation. The public school system, like the public airwaves, will become for profit entities to serve corporate interests. Educating our children will be of secondary importance to the profitability of the corporations managing the schools. Every public service will be transferred to the private sector in order provide more wealth to corporate America at public expense.

We see the foundations of privatization being laid in Iraq by the war profiteers. Billions of dollars in stolen wealth are being hauled out of Iraq by the very same corporations that lobbied for war. War is money and in America money is power to control the political process. It is a vicious cycle that will not end until the people recognize it for what it is and rise up against it.

of those pursuing privatization from the economic beliefs of Libertarians? Are Libertarians just extreme Republicans without the Puritanism?

I've always been told Libertarians are Republicans who smoke pot. I think that's overly simplistic and certainly less true now that the current batch of Republicans has no real resemblance to the Republican of 30-40 years ago. I wasn't a Republican even back then (ever) but they weren't the hoary pathological creatures they are now, just idealistically very different from me.

to make government small and unobtrusive and less costly. The corporate marauders that Sullivan describes want to privatize government functions, not to reduce the cost of government but instead to funnel money to their political supporters at even higher costs to the taxpayer. They basically want to increase political payoffs to their favored corporations and cronies. Take Iraq -- privatizing there actually costs taxpayers much more but Bush's cronies get the money. The faith-based initiative was promoted as letting private agencies perform social welfare functions of the state, when in reality these contracts were nothing more than a way for right-wing government to funnel tax revenues to its religious supporters, a process that increased government spending to the tune of ~$8 billion lasy year. That's not smaller government.

About draining funds out of the government and privatizing everything?

As I understand it, Libertarians think that the government should get out of most social services, including things like Fire Departments. So how does that make them different from these extreme Republicans?

Welcome to DU, joe green!

We the taxpayers would just pay enough in federal taxes to support a military and the government would get out of everything else (which would be done by the states)

Well worth the read and the recommend.

If only he was just a character in somebody's book--the problem is nobody could have made this up.

Maybe that would be too sickening.

The American people are not stupid. They didn't vote this guy in either time.

if we don't put fixing our election system right at the top of our list of priorities. Jane Smiley actually wrote another essay about that.

I am very impressed candor and willingness to put principal before profit because the neo-cons will make her pay for being an honest, true patriot by their usual character assassination through labeling, distortions and baseless lies. I will now have to read some of her books.

MOO is wonderfully funny.

I dread what's coming.

When the world collapsed around him, Hitler was pouring over a map with his generals directing the defense of Berlin by ordering the maneuvers of divisions that had been decimated by death, destruction and desertion.

Bush still has a nuclear arsenal at his command.

IMPEACH!

It makes me even fear more what might happen if Bush decides to invade Iran. For a long time I didn't think he would. No sane, reasonable leader would. But I guess he needs a new boogie man.

I think a lot of his desire to invade Iran is because he watched his father's approval ratings go up during the first Gulf War, but drop very low when it was over. I think Georgie wants to keep in a perpetual war because he thinks it will help his ratings.

Outraged by the escalation of the war in Iraq?

Incensed that the Democrats don't want to impeach Bush, even though they've now got the votes to do so?

Do you feel that letting Bush get away with criminal subversion of our democracy and the Constitution would be a travesty of everything you believe in?

Signing petitions and writing our representatives may not be enough to bring this madman to justice. A growing number of us feel that something more dramatic is necessary. We're putting out a call for a MASSIVE nationwide convergence on Washington to demand that that Congress impeach Bush NOW.

This wouldn't be part of an antiwar march or any other political demonstration (important as those are). It would be a separate event with one unequivocal purpose: calling for the impeachment of the President.

There are no organizers of this event. Or, rather, everybody who wants to be involved is an organizer. This is a grassroots DIY open-source wikiflashmob revolution, harnessing the tools that have evolved over the last several years. Never has it been so possible for millions of people around this country to self-organize something they believe in.

A website has been set up at www.marchtoimpeach.com as an initial information node to get the ball rolling, but if this is going to work everybody needs to make this their own and spread it around. Are we smart enough and sophisticated enough and pissed off enough to get a million people to DC to demand Bush's impeachment?

Let's find out.

www.marchtoimpeach.com