Wednesday, December 20, 2006

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)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you. I thought it was a good post too, and I'm glad you liked it. But everything you've quoted there was material I quoted. It was written by Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings -- a very good post indeed -- and she should properly have the credit for it.

It was funny, though; she put up that post right around the same time that I was saying substantially the same things to Patrick (okay, it was a rant) while I was cooking dinner.

TNH

ACM said...

well, I knew that, but it's the rest of the stuff that you said that I want my readers to take in when they "read the whole thing," not the rest of the Obsidian Wings post. but good to have the record straight for those who don't click through...