Just About Perfect

Andrew Sullivan is at about the best I've ever heard him here. Note that he is not calling W stupid, just self-delusional and (unknowingly) deeply, deeply morally lazy.

I've always thought that the moment one calls President Bush stupid is the second one lets him of the hook. He is not stupid. He is not an irretrievable dolt. He is just lazy in his morals and cowardly in his conscience. He knows, he knows that things are terribly, terribly wrong in Iraq. He knows thousands of people are dying because of his incompetence. He knows it is only becoming worse. He knows all of it and, I would venture to say, feels at least much of it. But he lacks the courage to say "I was wrong." He will leave it to history to decide, leave it to the military to resolve, leave it to God to vindicate him and soothe his conscience, but will never, ever, until the day he dies, take responsibility precisely because it is too painful to admit to.

Bush is a leader, but an awful one. He is a leader that acts like a stressful teenager--put out of the mind all things that might be stressful. Stand aloft the critics, patronize those that disagree, scoff at those who howl, roll one's eyes at criticism as so much banter from the dirty people that "just don't get it." This is the method--juvenile behavior that condescends upon those that he knows are probably right. Selfishly, vainly, cruelly, and recklessly does he continue to wrap himself into a cacoon of happy thoughts of Jesus and vindication and prescience that no one seems to be able to understand but a select few--thus the huddle of sycophants he surrounds himself with.

It's simultaneously sickening and pathetic--beyond lugubrious, beyond rational, beyond Party, and beyond principle. And I say all of this as one who once supported this Iraqi war effort and, perhaps very naively, I think it had a chance. But no more. How anyone of even the slightest conscience can continue along this path of failure and death and insanity with this childish disaster of a leader at the helm is beyond me. To do so only feeds into the hands of the petty "no blood for oil" cliche Left and the just as petty "they hate us for our freedom" cliche Right--not to mention the continued mindless deaths of thousands more.

I don't envy W Bush, though I don't pity him either. LBJ made his mistakes in Vietnam and--though far from fully--accepted and apologized for his error. He retreated from politics, grew his hair out, privately admitted that he "felt the weight of all those dead boys," and it killed him--pretty much literally. But at least he died as a man. I fear, President Bush will die as he is, a self-righteous child.