Friday, June 02, 2006

This makes me nervous

Sully, today:
My only rational conclusion is that the president cannot face the consequences of his own actions and so simply blocks them out. Confronting Cheney and Rumsfeld on this is beyond his capacity. His psyche, rescued from alcoholism by rigid fundamentalism, has been sealed off from rational assessment of empirical reality, from basic concepts of responsibility and accountability. The people he has surrounded himself with have only one thing in common: the knowledge that the maintenance of his denial keeps them in their jobs.


Me, back in March in a piece called "No Truth, No Consequences:
As has been chronicled ad infinitum, Dubya's life has been incredibly deficient in the corrective and formative effects of negative consequences. His presidency has been a microcosm of that fact, and its sequelae.
...
This disconnect has been true of the litany of Bush scandals, but such isolation from consequences has been the hallmark of George Bush's life. From his avoidance of the draft, to his escape from the obligations that he accepted as the price of that avoidance, to his knock-free string of business failures at ever-higher levels, George W. Bush has simply never had to suffer for, or even admit, any of his mistakes. And without consequences, truth is also scarce. Think about it: if you never, at any point in your upbringing, had to pay a price for lying, how strong would your commitment to the truth be?

I don't think Bush's easy, habitual prevarication makes him a compulsive liar. I suspect it is simply the product of an immature mind unconcerned with the difference between truth and fiction. He approaches communication much like your average five-year-old – right and wrong have no meaning beyond what he wants or seeks to avoid in the moment.

All in all, I think I'd rather be echoed by the MOF.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This should make you nervous. This is a fairly accurate description of the chimp-in-charge. Sullivan must have had a lucid non republican moment.

It's taken him (Sullivan) 6 years to figure out that chimpy is surrounded by "Yes Men."

WOW. What an epiphany.

4:02 AM  

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