Bush, The Spoiled Man-Child
What causes the fall of empires? Why, stubborn leaders who speak like toddlers and never admit mistakes

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, June 3, 2005

Know what real men do? They admit their mistakes. Know what real people do in times of great stress and strife and economic downturn? They seek help, understand they don't know all the answers, realize they might not've been asking the right questions in the first place.

Know what great leaders, great nations, do at times of war and fracture and massive bludgeoning debt? All of the above, all the time, with great intelligence and humility and grace and awareness and shared humanity. Or they die.

But not BushCo. This is the hilarious thing. This is the appalling thing, still. How can this man remain so blindly, staggeringly resolute? How can he be so appallingly ignorant of fact, of truth, of evidence, of deep thought? In short, what the hell is wrong with George W. Bush?

Here it is, another bumbling, barely articulate press conference by Dubya, one of the few he ever gives because he clearly hates the things and is deeply troubled by them, hates reporters who ask complicated questions and hates people who dare doubt his simple mind-set, his effectiveness, his policies, his lopsided myopic one-way black/white good/evil worldview.

Bush hates press conferences because he can't speak extemporaneously and can't form a complete sentence without mashing up the language like a 5-year-old on Ritalin and can't express a nuanced multifaceted idea to save his life and somewhere deep down in his bowels, he knows it, and he knows we know it, and it makes him mumble and stutter and secretly pray every moment to his angry righteous God he could be somewhere else, anywhere else, like sittin' on the back porch in Texas eatin' ribs and dreamin' 'bout baseball. Ahhh, there now. That's better.

But here he is, instead, stuck like a pinned bug in the Rose Garden, struggling to answer questions from the press about his low approval rating, his ultraviolent and botched war in Iraq, the huge bipartisan lack of support for his plan to gut Social Security, his inane assault on stem-cell research when the rest of the planet clearly supports it, how he has burned through any political capital he might've earned from the last election by being so utterly ineffectual and inept -- except, of course, when it comes to rigging the nation's courts and loading them with ultra-right-wing misogynist homophobes.

Go ahead, read the Q&A press conference, linked above. It's sort of staggering. It's also very impressive, in a soul-stabbing, nauseating way. Bush is, to be sure and in a word, unyielding. Determined. Immovable. Also, deeply confused. Myopic as hell. Frighteningly narrow minded. Weirdly random. Childish in a way that would make any good parent seriously question whether it might be time to get their child some intense psychological help.

Unlike you or me or any human anywhere who happens to be in possession of humility or subtlety of mind, Bush, to this day, admits zero mistakes. He refuses help, rejects suggestions that everything is not dandy and swell. He is confounded by questions that dare suggest he might be somewhat inept, or failing. And he absolutely insists that America exists in some sort of bizarre utopian vacuum, isolated and virtuous and towering like a mad hobbled king over our enemies and allies alike.

He is, in other words, our downfall.

Iraq? Going smoothly, Bush says, happy with the progress there, despite huge surges in insurgent violence and endless uptick of the U.S. death toll and the utter wasteland we've made of that poor, shredded nation.

Iran, North Korea and Egypt? Just dandy. No serious problems at all. Gotta talk more with that "North Korean" guy though, sort out the "nukuler" problem. Sneering thug John Bolton for U.N. ambassador? You betcha, still on track, a good man, despite what everybody -- and I do mean everybody -- says.

Overhaul Social Security, despite an enormous lack of support from Dems and Repubs and the vast majority of the American people? "Just a matter of time," Bush mutters, completely blinded to the fact that it's an enormous mistake. His deeply hypocritical stance on stem-cell research that kowtows to the deeply ignorant Christian Right? No real answer there. Doesn't compute. Just shrug that sucker right off.

Notice, when you read: There is no eloquent, deeply felt defense of ideas. There is no intellectual breakdown of opinion, no multifaceted explanation, no passionate clarification. And there is certainly no reference to outside ideas, a confession that we might need help, input, wisdom from our neighbors, from science, from the wise and the experienced.

It's a fact we've known all along but that keeps hammering at us like a drunk gorilla hammers at a dead mouse: Bush is able to speak only at one level, to one level. The level of a child. The level of a simpleton. The level of a sweet, bumbling, small-town mayor, addressing a PTA meeting, everyone in soft plaids and everyone drinking light beer and everyone wondering about just what the heck to do about the rusty swing sets and the busted stoplight.

Bush is, of course, not talking to you or me when he speaks at press conferences, or at his staged, prescreened, sycophant-rich "town hall" meetings, so full of plain, everyday folk hand selected for their blind love of Shrub and lack of ability to ask hard questions (read this transcript of a recent town hall on Social Security, and come away stupefied at the man's shocking ability to appear just exactly as uneducated as his questioners).

He is not speaking to conservative Democrats or moderate Republicans. He's not speaking to highly educated people who harbor a sincere curiosity about and tenuous understanding of the complexities of the world.

Bush is, of course, speaking to children. He is speaking to babies. It is a decidedly shallow and hollow and oddly deflated type of language that offers not a single nutritious or substantive thought to the political or cultural dialogue, other than to expand his staggering collection of embarrassing Bushisms.

It's all merely a crayon drawing, an intellectual wading pool, a big messy cartoon world populated by manly white good guys and fanged dark evil guys and we are good and They are evil and that's all there is to it so please stop asking weird tricky polysyllabic questions.

Maybe this is appropriate. Maybe this is as it should be. After all, we are, by and large, a nation that refuses to grow up, refuses to take responsibility for our gluttony and its global effects, refuses to see the world as it is now, a mad tangle of interconnected humanity, a global marketplace, a hodgepodge of variegated religions all stemming from the same source and that therefore all require a nimble and nuanced and deeply intelligent leadership to navigate. Qualities that our current leadership has, well, not at all.

The U.S. still behaves, when all is said and done, like a scared monkey, clinging desperately to a shiny spoon despite the trap closing in all around us, refusing to let go of this old, silly, faux-cowboy mentality of boom boom kill kill God is your daddy now sit down and shut up.

Bush embodies this. He is the very emblem of this childish, polarizing, sclerotic worldview. He literally cannot speak with any complexity, depth, resonance. He cannot function in a world of deep intellect, nuance, mature perspective. He is incapable of asking for help. He is unable to admit mistakes or discuss shortcomings or expand his mind-set to include the new and the possible.

What causes the downfall of empires? What causes the implosion of leadership, the slide of great nations into the deep muck of recession and war and mediocrity and numb irrelevance? That's easy. Stagnation. Refusal to change. Refusal to adapt, to progress. Refusal to grow the hell up, to take responsibility for our shortcomings and failures, as well as our successes.

Indeed, George W. Bush would make a great small-town mayor, somewhere deep in a dusty, forgotten part of Texas. His brand of personable, aww-shucks, none-too-bright simpleton talk is perfect for small town. It really is.

But for a major world power caught in the throes of a desperate need to change and grow and evolve, he is, of course, absolute death.