Dumb-Da-Dumb-Dumb
There's a certain irony in comparing the Bush administrations, when you consider how Machiavellian was the father, and what a dummy -- in the Charlie McCarthy sense -- was his vice president. Now we have the dummy in the top post, and his manipulator is the Machiavellian veep. Not to slander The Great Prince, who was a brilliant mind and didn't need a dim-witted foible through whom to practice his political machinations. Imagine if the pairing had been switched. Daddy and The Dick would have moved over to Langley and spent the whole time plotting, while Bush-Lite and Danny-Boy would have gee-gaw'd a mindless path over the links, clearing brush. All of which suggests that we should be grateful for small favors.
It's a wonder that any foreign leader would get near the White House, considering their track record. This administration has messed up virtually everything they've touched, both at home and abroad, and have only kept the wolves at bay by wrapping themselves every so tightly in the waronterrorism flag, and floating along unchallenged because all the donkeys are geldings. In truth, the remarkably shallow support here at home would evaporate in a flash if there were only someone of any stature offering opposition.
So it's downright curious that Tony Blair has swooned before The Bush Boy, Cheney got pictures of him rolling in the hay with some mad cows. Certainly his own party and the British people think he's gone around the haystack. Maybe if Blair spent a little less time licking Bush's bellicose boots and a little more time in Belfast, the peace process would be moving forward in Northern Ireland instead of backward.
It seems so obvious, and yet here we are. I suggest that more people should be reading Maureen Dowd -- and quiet down you Republicans, she attacked Clinton for his messes just as vociferously -- because she's been nailing The Crawford Cowboy with the obvious on a regular basis. When the campaign for international complicity was sinking like a stone, she noted, "in just a few days, the Iraq crisis went from Saddam having a noose around his neck to W. being bound by multilateral macramé." And she pretty much summed up the White House trash pile when she observed, "The problem with the Bush administration is that its bully pulpit is all bully and no pulpit."
Of course, in our vaunted democratic republic, it all comes down to the people, and when the people aren't paying attention, or fail to take their civic responsibility seriously -- by not fielding quality candidates and then failing to vote -- they deliver the kind of mess in which we find ourselves. The situation was eminently summated by Mark Twain in "The Mysterious Stranger" in 1910 when he wrote:
The loud little handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war. The pulpit will -- warily and cautiously -- object...at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will out shout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men... Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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