You Arrogant Little Man

The last this and that are starting to happen as regards the George W. Bush administration and as you can guess, for me, they can’t happen fast enough. I will never understand how average, well-meaning Americans could have ever thought this horrible person should have ever been allowed to wield power with anything stronger than a weed whacker in his soon to be former Crawford ranch. But they did and soon it will be over.

I just finished watching the excerpts of Charlie Gibson’s ABC News exit interview with the acting-President. His only real recurrent regret is that the intelligence on Iraq’s stockpiling of WMD turned out to be wrong. But that wasn’t his “mistake” so in reality he doesn’t have any regrets he cares to report. We will hear laundry lists of the things he ought to be regretting most likely for the rest of our lives since we will all be dealing with the consequences of those unending mistakes. But I want to focus in on something else he said.

When asked by Charlie Gibson what he hopes people will think about him, acting-President Bush said he hoped people recognized that he never wavered from his principles. What a jerk. He truly and deeply believes that whatever it is he calls principles outweigh the force of law, the Constitution, and most of the time, common sense. He champions consistency over correctness at every turn and will drive straight into the side of a mountain if he thinks he ought to be driving straight to get where he’s going.

I don’t think George W. Bush is quite as stupid as most people seem to think he is. If he was stupid, I mean real stupid, like Darwin Award winner stupid, then I could forgive that. That sort of stupid is built into the brain and can’t be improved upon. I don’t begrudge a genuinely stupid person for being stupid. But if someone who isn’t genuinely stupid chooses to act stupidly, again and again and again, out of principle, then that person is arrogant or, if it results in harm to others, evil. In this case, I won’t call Bush evil (see Dick Cheney to note the distinction), but he has engaged in willful stupidity so often and with such intent that the result has, in too many cases, resulted in evil in the name of the United States. And that sickens me.

But for George W. Bush, it is a point of pride that he never wavered, never second-guessed, never did something differently when given a chance, never even so much as admitted that a decision he made was his fault. The closest he comes is to suggest that going into Iraq was based on someone else’s faulty intelligence. He apologizes for someone else, but not for himself.

He is arrogant beyond a fault. Thousands upon thousands of people are dead because of his steadfast principles. Thousands more have been broken in body and spirit. Families are destroyed. Life savings, life’s works, are rendered to dust. An entire city and a big chunk of the gulf coast are still wrecked. The world economy is on the brink of complete collapse. This small man has failed at everything he has ever done in his life and his record remains perfect because he never wavers from his principles.

I have refrained from a lot of harsh language in this blog so far, but you know what??

Fuck you George W. Bush.