I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. - Thomas Jefferson

Friday, June 01, 2007

I wrote this as a comment last night, but I think it would make a good discussion point all on its own.  Para asked me if, in my heart of hearts, I believed Bush was a bad person.  Here’s my response.

No, I don’t.  I actually wrote about this in a comment just the other day.  Bush is a guy who goes with his gut instinct.  There’s a reason for this—it’s a coping mechanism he’s developed to deal with his sub-par intelligence.  Because of his family connections he has always been surrounded by smart people who were willing to do things for him.  As a result, he’s spent his life trusting the advice and wisdom of others.  The problem is that this makes him unsure of himself, unable to question his own beliefs or thoughts.  He’s told something and he believes it, then he sticks with it no matter what, because if he admitted error then he’d have to admit that his instincts for trusting people were wrong, and those are what has driven him his whole life.

I think Bush is probably a pretty decent guy.  I’d love to head down to the ranch and have a BBQ with him and Laura sometime, I bet they’d be fantastic hosts.  He’d be a great guy to work as a manager in a corporate setting.  He’d make a wonderful neighbor.  But he makes a terrible president.

The people he chose to trust, his cabinet, were some of the best decisions imaginable at the time.  Rumsfeld’s pedigree was impeccable, Cheney was the master behind the Gulf War and Halliburton, Condi was brilliant, Colin Powell a national hero.  Everyone was thrilled with his picks.  I know I was.

Then 9/11 happened.  As I’ve said before, had 9/11 never happened Bush would have been just your average mediocre president, scoring a few victories and suffering a few losses, but generally just someone who ambled through his time in office, kinda like his father.  He’d leave office not as a stellar president, but he’d be generally well regarded.

But 9/11 did happen, and it changed everything.  Rumsfeld and Cheney made it so that only the information they wanted him to hear reached his desk.  They wanted Bush to make particular decisions, and they knew how to masterfully manipulate things to get him to do so.  They knew he trusted them implicitly, so when they said that invading Iraq was essential, he did it.  When they told him that torture was necessary to defend America, and produced legal briefs by Woo and Gonzales stating that this really wasn’t torture, he signed off on it.

He is a weak, weak man.

That weakness is evident in how long some cabinet members stayed in office.  Any competent president would have fired George Tenet about five minutes after the second plane hit the WTC.  Rumsfeld should have been gone about 6 months after the invasion.  While he can’t force him to do so, Bush should have demanded Cheney’s resignation, and with the latter’s heart problems this could have been easily accomplished.  But he didn’t.  Why?

Weakness.  He trusted these people based on his gut.  If they turned out to be wrong, then his gut was wrong.  His gut is the only mechanism he trusts when making decisions, so the gut would be used to determine their replacements.  But if the gut is faulty—how can he trust the replacements?

Faced with uncertainty or rigidity, Bush chose the devil he knew over the devil he did not.  And now we’re all paying the price.

Bush isn’t bad, he’s weak.  And weak men can be encouraged to do bad things.