Undermining normal presumptions

This post at Making Light does a great job of capturing something that I've felt in a visceral way about Bush, which is that much of why he confounds pundits of all stripes is that he just doesn't respond to developments in the way that we expect of "normal people."

I think that Bush violates those assumptions. He is more or less completely irresponsible. You can see this tripping people up over and over. For instance, when Colin Powell gives Bush his ‘hey, think really hard about Iraq; you break it, you own it’ speech: that seems to have been, for Powell, a big deal to do, and for him, assuming responsibility for a whole country would be a big deal as well. I don’t think Powell understood that he was dealing with someone to whom those words would mean nothing.
. . .
The problem is that Bush is not, in this sense, a normal person. … [The] sense of “can’t” that’s at work in statements like “he can’t just ignore the combination of the ISG report, the election, his own unpopularity, and the unanimous advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff” has no purchase on him whatsoever.

Worth reading the whole thing, as it also picks up on the key distinctions that can be observed between Empty Rhetoric from Bush and co, and The True Beliefs that transcend the intervention of facts or circumstances...

(via Medley)