I Cogitate

"...Came to all the meetings," Rubenstein told the conventioneers. "Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company...'

"...In the 2000 South Carolina primary, George W. Bush stood next to a man described as a "fringe" figure - a man who had attacked Bush's own father - at a Bush rally. With Bush applauding him, the man said John McCain "abandoned" veterans. McCain, who was tortured in a North Vietnamese POW camp, was incensed. Five U.S. Senators who fought in Vietnam, including Democrats John Kerry, Max Cleland and Bob Kerrey, condemned the attack and called on Bush to repudiate it. When pressed on it at a debate hosted by CNN's Larry King, Bush meekly muttered that he shouldn't be held responsible for what others say. Even when he's standing next to them at a Bush rally..."

Why won't Bush admit mistakes?
Andrew Greeley
Chicago Sun Times
September 19, 2007

Last week was a strange one. The commander in chief, the president of the United States, took refuge behind a military field commander to achieve credibility with the American people. Through constant repetition of his name, almost an invocation, George Bush built up Gen. David Petraeus as the man who finally found a strategy that would work in Iraq. Because he said it would work, therefore, it had worked.

Robert Draper's Dead Certain, a sympathetic portrait of the Bush presidency, reports that the president had insisted to his chief of staff Andrew Card up to the time of Card's resignation in April 2006 that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The president does not give up easily on something of which he is dead certain. He can't give up on it...

...Draper effectively dismisses the notion that the president is just plain dumb and that Cheney or Rove were running the presidency. Yet, he adds, the questions that some who served on Bush's staff had were whether "a man [could be] all that secure with himself if he felt compelled to assert over and over that he never wavered, never lost a wink of sleep and harbored no regrets? What bespoke his compulsive optimism, and was it, in the end, worth the loss of credibility?"

It is a question about which many Americans wonder. Why can't he change his mind?

...Some members of Alcoholics Anonymous will tell you that such behavior is not atypical in men who beat drunkenness by sheer willpower. They no longer drink, but they have not gone through the humility and the transformation of the self that the AA requires of its members. The president proved he could beat alcoholism without sitting around and talking about it (except with Billy Graham). I'm not saying this is the explanation of the president's sunny confidence about Iraq. I am saying, however, that it is a model that fits the data.

Those who are not troubled by the illusions that have marked this presidency won't need such a model. Those who wonder how he can possibly believe that at last we are going to win this war we should never have begun might try another model. In fact, however, the president's endless optimism and refusal to admit errors are, to put it quite bluntly, abnormal behavior.

Bush's stairway to paradise
Hoping that history will somehow vindicate him, the president has entered a phase of decadent perversity.
Sidney Blumenthal
Salon

Sep. 20, 2007 | There has never been a moment when we were not winning in Iraq. Victory has followed victory, from "Mission Accomplished" to the purple fingers of the Iraqi election to, most recently, President Bush's meeting at Camp Cupcake in Anbar province with Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni leader of the group Anbar Awakening (who was assassinated a week later). Turning point has followed turning point, from Bush's proclamation two years ago of his "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" to his announcement last week of his "Return on Success." "We're kicking ass," he briefed the Australian deputy prime minister on Sept. 6 about his latest visit to Iraq. In his quasi-farewell address to the nation on Sept. 13, Bush assigned any possible shortcomings to Gen. David Petraeus and bequeathed his policy "beyond my presidency" to his successor...

...In his interviews with Draper, he is constantly worried about weakness and passivity. "If you're weak internally? This job will run you all over town." He fears being controlled and talks about it relentlessly, feeling he's being watched. "And part of being a leader is: people watch you." He casts his anxiety as a matter of self-discipline. "I don't think I'd be sitting here if not for the discipline ... And they look at me -- they want to know whether I've got the resolution necessary to see this through. And I do. I believe -- I know we'll succeed." He is sensitive about asserting his supremacy over others, but especially his father. "He knows as an ex-president, he doesn't have nearly the amount of knowledge I've got on current things," he told Draper.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.)...

...Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. "Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president's support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a 'Big New Thing.'" Other aides played on Bush's self-conception as "the Decider." "To sell him on an idea," writes Draper, "aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision." But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today..."

...Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As the sands of time run down, he has decided that no matter what he does, history will finally judge him as heroic.

The greater the chaos, the more he reinforces and rigidifies his views. The more havoc he wreaks, the more he insists he is succeeding. His intensified struggle for self-control is matched by his increased denial of responsibility. Hence Petraeus...

...Bush's ever-inflating self-confidence hides his gaping fear of failure. His obsession with deference demands exercises of humiliation that never satisfy him. His unwavering resolve is maintained by his adamant refusal to wade into the waters of ambiguity. "You can't talk me out of thinking freedom's a good thing!" he protests to his biographer. For Bush, even when he is long out of office, presiding at his planned library's Freedom Institute -- "I would like to build a Hoover Institute" -- victory will always be just around the corner.

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