Dubya Disease

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/7248

Dubya Disease
by Bob Burnett | May 4 2007


It's getting hard to poke fun at President Bush. As his approval ratings have plummeted, the frequency of Bush's malapropisms, hyperboles, and outright lies has increased; as has his propensity for gauche behavior and buffoonery. It's become clear that he's contracted incurable Dubya disease.

Many of us who never supported Bush - who thought he stole the 2000 election and proceeded to fulfill our worst expectations - dismiss him as a fool and rejoice in the prospect that his disease is dragging the Republican Party down with him. However, there are two vexing problems with this perspective: one is that Bush has twenty more months left in the Oval Office and, therefore, can still do lots of damage - launch a nuclear attack on Iran, for example. The second problem is that when Liberals attack Bush, they alienate the third of the electorate who believe the office of the President deserves respect, even if the occupant may not; these are the same Americans who Liberals want as allies on issues such as Global Climate Change.

In order to reach out to all Americans, Liberals must look beyond Dubya's behavior and overcome the reality that Bush is the most polarizing President since Richard Nixon. While it's a good thing to have political debate, it's unhealthy to have the degree of acrimony and incivility that we current experience in American politics. One way to overcome this antagonism is to look at the elements of the American psyche that produced George Bush, get in touch with the "inner Dubya" of the American political system, and view Bush not as the problem but rather as a symptom of a larger dysfunction - Dubya disease.

There are three trends in American politics that produced the Bush Presidency; tendencies that did not originate with Dubya, but were accentuated by this Presidency over the past six-plus years. One is the propensity to lie, to tell outright falsehoods in order to achieve political ends. While lying had long been a characteristic of most American political campaigns, it was the dominant feature of George W. Bush's candidacy: Bush wasn't a successful CEO or an effective Texas governor, as he claimed to be; he wasn't a compassionate conservative or a committed environmentalist; and certainly wasn't "a uniter" or a leader who would "usher in a new era of responsibility." Since his background was fabricated, it's not surprising that the dominant feature of the Bush Presidency has been prevarication: the White House lied about the danger posed by Saddam Hussein; about the probable effects of massive tax cuts for the rich on the standard of living of average Americans; about their concern for the health and safety of our military; and about the dangers posed by global climate change. They've lied about everything.

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[MasonJar]

1. Makes a lot of sense. n/t