The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President

 


The Psychology Behind the Worst Possible President

By Jane Smiley, HuffingtonPost.com

Posted on January 17, 2007, Printed on January 17, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46794/

Back in the year 2000, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote and was
shoe-horned into office by the Supreme Court in spite of clear conflicts of
interest on the part of Scalia and Thomas, the psychology of Little George
was known to only a few.
To most of us he seemed like a doofus -- a more or less well-meaning guy who
enjoyed running things like baseball teams and the State of Texas if not too
much work was involved. Had been an alcoholic and a drug user, but had
apparently come clean in some hazy, quasi-religious way -- that was his
personal history to many Americans (if not to all those who met with Karl
Rove behind closed doors and heard the truth).
At any rate, I remember thinking that Bill Clinton had done such a good job
over the years getting the budget into a surplus and winning good feelings
around the world that it really didn't matter who of the four who were
running (Gore, Bradley, McCain, Bush) might win. They all seemed about the
same in lots of ways.
What we really needed was some respite from Clinton's own penchant for
mischief. I liked Clinton. I remember that The New Yorker magazine asked me
for my take on the Lewinsky scandal, and I said that on balance, in spite of
the brouhaha, I still preferred a president who would make love, not war.
Clinton was a flawed human being, that was evident, but he knew it. He never
didn't know it. And he was always trying to make amends.
But he was exhausting -- or the media made him exhausting. I thought we were
due for a rest.
Little did we know, of course, that the neocons thought we were due for a
war. Thinktank gun-jockeys looking for a fight. Do they personally have some
human qualities? Who cares. May they rot.
At any rate, what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker
faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to
expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with
Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to
control.
The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential
candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had
publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that
for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker
engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the "perks" Bush
offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb
and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy
alliance -- goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right
there at the pivot was Little George.
It's pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery
and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet
Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice. At the same time, his words (and ideas)
were going to be supplied by Michael Gerson, who was his favorite speech
writer for five or six years, a man who hides his unscrupulous neocon soul
beneath a holier-than-thou, falsely modest self presentation. Christian
soldier in every sense of the word, and someone who has largely escaped the
contempt he deserves for the mess we are in.
At the same time, Little George has a hard time with bad news, so he was
never going be told the truth -- he can't take the truth, as Jack Nicholson
might say -- this is evident in the famous 9/11 film of Bush reading about
his pet goat when he gets news of the WTC. Talk about dumbstruck and
unprepared and feckless and doltish! No, I don't think Little George planned
the Trade Center attacks. If he had, he would have practiced a smarmy fake
reaction, and he didn't.
But he did get a feel, just a little feel, right after the attacks, of what
it might be like to lead the nation. He got a feel and he liked it, and for
the purposes of the neocons, it was a good feel and it gave them something
to build on in their plan to overcome the cautious side of his nature,
represented by B/S/B. The neocons, as we know to our sorrow, never pay back
anything they owe, except perhaps with betrayal, so even though B/S/B got
them into office, they were never going to listen to B/S/B unless they
absolutely had to.
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, dependent, 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.
That's the tit Little George has been sucking for the last six years -- the
deluded propaganda of the neocons, addressed first to him and through him to
the rest of us. What we saw the other night, when he proposed more war
against more "foes" was the madman the last six years have created. This
time, in his war against Iran, he doesn't even feel the need for minimal PR,
as he did before attacking Iraq. All he is bothering with are signals --  
ships moving here, admirals moving there, consulates being raided in this
other place. He no longer cares about the opinions of the voters, the
Congress, the generals, the press, and he especially disdains the opinions
of B/S/and B. Thanks to Gerson, he identifies his own little ideas with God
(a blasphemy, of course, but hey, there's lots of precedent on this), so
there's no telling what he will do.
We can tell by the evidence of the last two months that whatever it is, it
will be exactly the thing that the majority of the voters do not want him to
do, exactly the thing that James Baker himself doesn't want him to do. The
propaganda that Bush's sponsors and handlers have poured forth has ceased to
persuade the voters but succeeded beyond all measure in convincing the man
himself.
He will tell himself that God is talking to him, or that he is possessed of
an extra measure of courage, or he that he is simply compelled to do
whatever it is. The soldiers will pay the price in blood. We will pay the
price in money. The Iraqis will pay the price in horror. The Iranians will
pay the price, possibly, in the almost unimaginable terror of nuclear
attack. Probably, the Israelis will pay the price, too.
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. Some of his Frankensteins have
bailed, some haven't dared to, and others still seem to believe. His actions
and his orders, especially about Iran, seem to be telling us that he will
stop at nothing to prove his dominance. The elder Bush(es), Scrowcroft,
Baker, and their friends, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gerson, and the neocons have
made the monster and in the process endangered the country, the
Constitution, and the world, not to mention the sanity of wretches like Jose
Padilla (for an analysis of the real reason Gitmo continues to exist, see
Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate, here.
Maybe the bums planned this mess for their own profit, or maybe they planned
to profit without mess; maybe some of them regret what they have wrought.
However, they all share the blame for whatever he does next.
Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/46794/

 


Homer J Simpson wrote:

  Could you maybe consider GETTING THE FUCK OVER IT?

  One would think you knew the man personally in order to hate him so
passionately. You don't, so the best you can do is parrot somebody
else's bullshit second-hand because you're incapable of coming up with
any of your own. What's worse, the bullshit you're parroting is from
somebody else who can't possibly know the man well enough to hate him,
which means it's at least third-hand bullshit. Makes you wonder who
originated it and why _they_ hate him, doesn't it?

  Besides, do you even realize that there's an upcoming Presidential
election just next year? Have you considered the potential candidates
for that one? THAT'S what you oughta be focusing your attention on
instead of whining about the past, ya jackass.


  Mark L. Fergerson

 

nunya@bid.nes wrote:

Take it easy. Homer is just pitiful jealous Canadian.

 



Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .....


Jealous of Bush?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .....

Thanks for the best laugh I have had since "The world's worst hunting
dog"!!!!

 

On Thu, 18 Jan 2007 15:48:27 GMT, "Homer J Simpson"


---
Why Mr. Beagle, there you go again with your anal fixations, LOL.


--
JF