Your first clue would be, he gave a speech Sunday Night on American television sometime around nine o'clock. After five years as President, and six as Governor of Texas, you would think that an alumnus of Yale, to say nothing of Harvard Business College, would know how to give a speech. You would think at least he would have the gestures down, and they wouldn't look so wooden, so stiff, so-well, obvious, I guess.
Then again, this guy isn't really used to having to give a speech where he actually admits to any kind of mistake,to any kind of, let us be plain-fuck up. And that's what it all comes down to. The quality of this speech is almost symbolic of the problems with this President, and this Administration. It's just one big fuck up.
The amazing thing is that it took so many people so long to catch on. But shit happens, and it took one cataclysmic national disaster, in the form of Hurricane Katrina, to show this President, and this Administration, for the bumbling fools that he and it is. Once that occurred, then everything else started to become ever more clear.
But, the really amzing thing about the Bush Administration is that it actually has turned out to be a walking picnic of woes. There are four different kinds of bad governments. You have those that are made up of liars and thieves. You have the ones that are sinister and repressive. You have the ones that are wrong headed and arrogant. And finally, you have the ones that are just blatantly incompetent.
It is rare that you will find an American Administration that doesn't contain, on at least one level or another, some aspect of at least one of these failings. In fact, I would say it would be almost impossible to not find at least some degree of one of these faults in even the best of them. In way too many cases, unfortunatley, you will find an appreciable degree of two of these failings. Then, there is the thankfully extremely rare case, when an American Administration will contain as many as three of these failings, in a couple of cases to a significant degree. The Administrations of Buchanan, and Nixon, and Harding, may possibly be three eamples of Administrations that contained three eventually crippling shortcomings.
But the Bush Administration may indeed go down in history as the first to be infected with all four of them. Take the war in Iraq. Lies, deceits, manipulations. Wrong headed and arrogant, even when faced with the facts that things did not go exactly according to plan, to say the least. Sinister and repressive in the way that any opponent, real or perceived, to this ill-conceived adventure, was treated either directly or indirectly, through political attacks and slanders, all too often with the aid of a cowed and in some cases a bought and paid for press.
Luckily, for the country, and maybe for the world, the Bush Administration contained that one final, fatal flaw of incompetence, in some cases outright stupidity, that caused it to come crashing down a lot quicker than it ordinarily might have. The incompetent way the Iraqi War has been bungled was really an eye opener in the face of Hurricane Katrina. Before the Hurricanes, and the incompetent way the government responded, it was a relatively easy process to blame the media for reporting overwhelmingly negative news about the Iraqi War and insurgency. It was a simple process to accuse the Democrats of playing politics (especially since in a good many cases a lot of them probably were).
But now the truth is out. Bush is a liar, a charlatan, a fraud, a cheat. He is an arrogant megalomaniac with delusions of Messiahhood, if not out and out godhood. And he is obviously incompetent. It is only right that he has taken to saying lately that the responsibility for the various mishaps rest at his desk. For, in fact, far from merely being something that just sounds good and proper and humble, the awful truth is-it's the awful truth.
