Rant Of The Year (In A Good Way)
by tristero
Oh, this is delicious writing by Jane Smiley. Read the whole thing. Here are just a few highlights:
Bruce Bartlett, The Cato Institute, Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, William F. Buckley, Sandra Day O’Connor, Republican voters in Indiana and all the rest of you newly-minted dissenters from Bush’s faith-based reality…those of us who have been anti-Bush from day 1 (defined as the day after the stolen 2000 election) have a few pointers for you that should make your transition more realistic.
1. Bush doesn’t know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him…
2. Bush doesn’t care whether you disagree with him….You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn’t matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you, he’s not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him…
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a “sense of entitlement”. Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes…
4. President Bush is your creation…Bush does what he wants because you have let him…
5. Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation…
The US could have become a moderating force in what seems now to be an inevitable battle among the three monotheistic Abrahamic religions, but you have made that impossible by flattering and empowering our own violent and intolerant Christian right.
You have created an imperium, heedless of the most basic wisdom of the Founding Fathers–that at the very least, no man is competent enough or far-seeing enough to rule imperially…
Now you are fleeing him, but it’s only because he’s got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don’t know why he’s losing. You think he’s made mistakes. But no. He’s losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas… [emphasis added.]
6. As Bad as Bush is, Cheney is Worse.
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