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| And Now a Word From General Sanchez |
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| ....should be getting more coverage than Scott McClellan |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, June 04, 2008. Well, it’s Obama. I’m voting for him, I’m somewhat awestruck we might have an actual African American First Family, and I remain impressed with his speeches and presence. I’m not convinced he’ll be a better president than Hillary Clinton would, but neither Clinton nor Obama is the presiding power about the election this November. That title belong to George Bush, without question our worst President, and I can only hope that title is his forever. We could survive nothing worse. Because he was so bad, he inspires conflicting thought. Do we take a chance on someone who could unite us and push this administration far into the past, or do we go with someone who has fewer potential plusses but far fewer unknowns, and doesn't inspire the fear that Obama does? The Democrats seem to have made their choice, for better or worse, and it will be Obama the Unknown vs. McCain the Rictus. Although Obama has the potential to be a great President, he’s never been in executive power over anything where all credit and blame becomes his. We don’t know how he’ll act under severe attack. It’s a worry. With Clinton we had restricted hopes but a far more solid bedrock, and we knew we’d be okay. McCain is simply too old. That corporeal longevity runs in his family is nice, as we know from his mother, but an accompanying mental acuity doesn’t, as we also know from his mother. But it is Bush who hovers over the election more than the candidates. For the first time, his presence now supercedes that of Dick Cheney, who has almost no credibility nor affection from anyone. Bush has left a burned field for his successor, one that will demand immediate tough choices. Bush once, I think, saw himself making those choices, heroically, but he predictably wimped out and let the dead and our reaction to them nudge public momentum. This is because Bush is a bad preppy, a known character type. For those of you who didn’t go to an all male preparatory boarding school, there were character types that had appeared on those campuses since the Spanish American war, long before J. D. Sallinger’s and John Knowles and many others created a fictional portrait of such places. Bush embodies the Bad Preppy: A powerful sense of entitlement combined with a reluctance to examine its justification because he knows what might lurk beneath. Partially influenced by the inevitable slathering of liberal arts ed, he romanticizes himself, and substitutes decisive action for thought. This was abetted by the Warner Brother westerns we grew up with, and with the Davy Crockett motto: be sure you’re right, and then go ahead, all this in the days of limited media competition and television was viewed as a form of magic. Yes, I know the type. I was a card carrying member. And I know how that mind works and does not. Although it's been Scott McClellan's book which has had the most coverage, a far better book and far more frightening one is also out. General Ricardo Sanchez, who the Bushies tried to blame for initial failures in Iraq, including the Abu Graib scandal, has written "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story." In it, he provides a number of interactions with Bush that the left leaning blogs present as evidence Bush is crazy. In a way, yes, but this is a recognizable script from the media Bush grew up with, that I grew up with. Most famously, after four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, the President, mistaking this private Christian Militia as both competent and U.S. soldiers, and innocent in the incident that caused their deaths, tried to incite the actual military to behave as if they were. Bush had a video conference with his national security team and the generals in Iraq, Sanchez says. And to the uninitiated, Bush wound up a bunch of nonsense that Sanchez charitably calls a confused prep talk. "Kick ass!" he quotes the president as saying. "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.....There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!" Setting aside the absurdity of, first, the bloody and unfocused goals, and two, the plural pronoun, Bush sounds like one of Ed Wood's characters in Plan Nine from Outer Space, but what he's aiming for is the resolution of William Travis, or the discovery of those Marines who trained under John Wayne that, gee, they were man enough to kill and win battles, a motif in many war movies of that era. It would be great if the presidency was held by someone who didn't thrill in far removed war, and sought sounder results than movie scripts suggest. In this, at least, we will be better off regardless of who wins. |
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