The Common Touch

Here's looking down on you

This (Salon article--ad watch or sub. req.) doesn't just tell you what a sheer, undiluted-acts-like-a-spoiled-twelve-year-old-asshole our president is...it also speaks volumes about a press corpse whose collective somnambulatory scrawlings over the last decade or so have gone a long way towards enabling the asshole-in-chief and making juvenile expressions of simian dominance "business-as-usual" at the White House. After all, they're the ones who implicity or explicity made the central issue of the 2000 election...beer...as in "which candidate would you most want to have a beer with?" Nice...especially when you think about how Shrub himself wouldn't deign to drink with ANY of them. Nope--they could serve him a beer...and clean up afterwards...and maybe stick around to be the butt of what his warped brain thinks is a joke.

Yeah, the goddamn tone sure was changed, alright:

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket." In front of other aides, Bush joked repeatedly that he would fire Rove. (Laura Bush's attitude toward Rove was pointedly disdainful. She nicknamed him "Pigpen," for wallowing in dirty politics. He was staff, not family -- certainly not people like them.)

Bush's deployed his fetish for punctuality as a punitive weapon. When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked. Aides have been fearful of raising problems with him. In his 2004 debates with Sen. John Kerry, no one felt comfortable or confident enough to discuss with Bush the importance of his personal demeanor. Doing poorly in his first debate, he turned his anger on his communications director, Dan Bartlett, for showing him a tape afterward. When his trusted old public relations handler, Karen Hughes, tried gently to tell him, "You looked mad," he shot back, "I wasn't mad! Tell them that!"

At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!" Rove, according to Draper, was Bush's "favorite punching bag," and the president often threw futile and meaningless questions at him, and shouted, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about."

Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity. "Rumsfeld would later tell his lieutenants that if you wanted the president's support for an initiative, it was always best to frame it as a 'Big New Thing.'" Other aides played on Bush's self-conception as "the Decider." "To sell him on an idea," writes Draper, "aides were now learning, the best approach was to tell the president, This is going to be a really tough decision." But flattery always requires deference. Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today."

Yet, even as Bush demands this sort of craven fealty, he is--as might be expected--so maddeningly, goddamned insecure that a professional ratfucker like Don Rumsfeld can play him like a pipe organ in a cathedral. No wonder the last six plus years have seen the most dimwitted, lurching executive policies ever.

And King George expects us to clean up for him once his term's up...while he exists in comfortable retirement on the public dole.