24
Jul
Let’s have no more talk about Bush’s stupidity
A lot of people think George W. Bush is stupid. It’s an understandable mistake: he often acts as though he is. But the truth is worse.
The truth is that the things he doesn’t know are things he doesn’t want to know. His followers, the ones who also aren’t stupid and who aren’t simply lying about what they think, are on the same frequency; he and they are deliberately, sometimes heroically, ignorant.
The idea of invading Iraq was a self-evidently stupid one. You needn’t have been a top-flight geo-political strategist to realize that. Most of the world picked up on it well before the invasion became a reality. Millions of people went to the trouble of clogging the streets in cities around the world to press the point. Hundreds of people in our own government pointed out the various military, political and civil society pitfalls, and some of them produced volumes of recommendations, studiously ignored, on how to avoid those pitfalls. So arriving at the conclusion that the invasion and occupation was an immensely dangerous and most likely doomed proposition didn’t require a lot of smarts; it was simply a matter of not choosing to be stupid.
That’s an important distinction. Stupidity is a more or less involuntary condition. Deliberate ignorance isn’t. The same distinction applies to the conventional wisdom of an isolated president. Does he live in a bubble? Sure. Does he have to? Unless you think the most powerful man in the world can’t get whatever information he wants whenever he wants it, no. Limiting himself to what he hears from a handful of close advisors is a choice.
That was then: At this point, Bush has done so many things that are so irretrievably damaging to so many people that he’d have to be nuts to solicit outside opinions. Who would want to hear that he’s caused the needless deaths of a hundred thousand or more Iraqis, with no end in sight? Who would want to hear that he’s destroyed the Iraqi middle class and bolstered recruiting for terrorists across the globe, or that he’s green-lighted the undoing of the Cedar Revolution, the shining Lebanese moment of which he’s so proud?
Not to say he isn’t nuts anyway; just that under the present circumstances, few people would be willing to assume a burden of guilt on that scale even if they had the capacity for empathy or guilt or shame, something Bush hasn’t demonstrated. The point is that calling him stupid is, as Bush himself would say, a misunderestimation of the degree to which he’s responsible for his actions and their outcomes. It’s an excuse that oughtn’t to be permitted him. He’s done what he did because he wanted to.
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I disagree, to a point. In my opinion Bush is what is known in the trade as a “stupid asshole.” That is, someone who is stupid, and an asshole, at the same time.
July 24th, 2006 at 5:49 pmImpulse Control…
Hi Weldon…
Well, I think the core issue here is one of impulse control and delayed gratification. In the human maturation process, one of the key developments is the ability to delay gratification to accomplish a greater goal.
One of the problems of this administration is that, like a small child, they want what they want and they want it NOW! Worse yet, they can only see what is directly in front of them. I suspect it’s less the result of willful ignorance or some plan in line with specific values as it is simply short sightedness and the inability to even conceptualize a larger goal or the consequences of actions. They lack the ability to draw cause and affect relationships.
Not surprisingly, this is a classic addictive behavior model. Addicts want merely what they want—nothing else. And that lack of impulse control stays with even those who abstain (hence the ‘dry drunk’ syndrome).
We are experiencing, I’m afraid, the hangover of a lifetime—and all because this administration simply wants what it wants. Who’s gonna tell Dad he cracked up the car?
July 25th, 2006 at 5:47 amBush is willfully ignorant. He has no patience and no appetite for “facts”. While you’re busily figuring out how wrong he is, he’s “acting on his gut”. War is good bidness.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:03 amYeah, willfully ignorant is the best term I can think of. He’s developed only the kind of intelligence that allows him to succeed in politics. Everything else is a distraction. It’s not a matter of capability, it’s a matter of choice. He simply doesn’t care what the results of his actions are, just so long as he can still convince people he’s on the right path. It’s a scary type of addictive behavior.
July 27th, 2006 at 5:27 pmStay the course.
That sums up the essence of George W. Bush.
His gut tells him what to do then his gut tells him to stay the course. The gut is not capable of learning from past mistakes. Bush doesn’t think with his brain, he thinks with his gut. Is there any wonder that everything turns out to be a piece of shit. That, after all, is all that one’s gut is capable of producing.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:20 pm