Res ipso loquitur. The thing speaks for itself. But I will say that, as appalling (but not surprising) as I find the revelations in this section of the new issue of Time magazine, I also strongly sense that the reporter and his editor went to great pains to soften up their descriptions of the egregiously inattentive, disinterested, sociopathic personality of Mr. Bush and the level of dysfunctionality of his presidency.
I am reading Bush On The Couch, and its painful observations about Bush color my reading of the following excerpt:
[A]s if the West Wing were suddenly snakebit, his franchise player, senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, was on the disabled list for part of last week, working from home after being briefly hospitalized with painful kidney stones.
Bush has always said the presidency is about doing big things, and a friend who chatted with him one evening in July said he seemed to be craving a fresh mission even though the one he has pursued in Iraq is far from being on a steady footing. “He was looking for the next really important thing to do,” the friend said. “You could hear him almost sorting it out to himself. He just sort of figured it would come.”
But when it did, he did not immediately show that he sensed its magnitude. On the Monday that Hurricane Katrina landed and the Crescent City began drowning, Bush was joshing with Senator John McCain on the tarmac of an Air Force base in Arizona, posing with a melting birthday cake. Like a scene out of a Michael Moore mockumentary, he was heading into a long-planned Medicare round table at a local country club, joking that he had “spiced up” his entourage by bringing the First Lady, then noting to the audience that he had phoned Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff from Air Force One. “I said, ‘Are you working with the Governor?'” Bush recounted.
“He said, ‘You bet we are.'” But the President was not talking about the killer storm. He was talking about immigration, and the Governor was Arizona’s. […]
Bush does not appear to tap sources deep inside his government for information, the way his father or Bill Clinton did, preferring to get reports through channels. A highly screened information chain is fine when everything is going well, but in a crisis it can hinder. Louisiana officials say it took hours for Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to reach Bush (although when she did, he talked to her soothingly, according to White House officials). “His inner circle takes pride in being able to tell him ‘everything is under control,’ when in this case it was not,” said a former aide. “The whole idea that you have to only burden him with things ‘that rise to his level’ bit them this time.”
A related factor, aides and outside allies concede, is what many of them see as the President’s increasing isolation. Bush’s bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news—or tell him when he’s wrong. …
Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. “The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,” the aide recalled about a session during the first term. “Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, ‘All right. I understand. Good job.’ He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.” … […]
The result is a kind of echo chamber in which good news can prevail over bad—even when there is a surfeit of evidence to the contrary.
For example, a source tells TIME that four days after Katrina struck, Bush himself briefed his father and former President Clinton in a way that left too rosy an impression of the progress made. “It bore no resemblance to what was actually happening,” said someone familiar with the presentation.
Finally, if the Bush team initially missed the significance of a city with a majority of black citizens in peril, it may be because he has organized his presidency around a different segment of the population. …
“Living Too Much in the Bubble?,” Time, September 11, 2005
Other Lisa just sent me this joke. It’s apt:
Subject: Roe v Wade
Q: What is George W. Bush’s position on Roe vs.. Wade?
A: He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.
than this joke of a misAdministration.
I keep running Nancy Pelosi’s words through my brain: “Clueless…dangerous…”
And Bush not leaving the classroom in Florida immediately because he “didn’t want to frighten the children”: look, pal, you’re the President of the United States. You don’t have to tell the kids, “We’re under attack and all screwed”, just say, “Oops, something’s come up that I have to see to right away. Maybe I can borrow a copy of the book so I can see how the story turns out…”
A lot of businesses are giving potential employees psychological tests to see how they’d do under pressure…maybe it’s time we did that for our politicians. How many of our current crop would be tossed out on their collective butts?
Love the joke – it just got forwarded to all my friends and family.
FYI Keith Olbermann is doing a 3 hour special on Katrina. Now on hour 1.5.
I once worked for a privately-held business where all of us reported indirectly to one of the owners, just because he was an owner. He wasn’t so much in a bubble as in an alternate universe–his take on events was often narrowly focused and not very practical.
If you had to tell him something he might not like, sometimes he would say Thank you and smile. Other times, he would explode in a violent tirade terrifying in its ferocity.
Trouble is, you never knew which you’d get.
So the various staffers worked out elaborate ways of skirting him with information. We managed to do what had to be done, gave him as much information as he wanted, and tried not to let him derail reality.
Everything I’ve read about Bush’s interactions with people when he’s out of the public eye says he treats subordinates very badly, and that his rages are vicious and seemingly uncontrolled. With a medium-sized business, it’s one thing. But when you’re talking about the very top of the government, it’s quite another.
i’ve been in such settings, and it’s very stressful and disorienting. I’m sorry you had to suffer through it.
I’ve always wished– when I see them on the screen — that I could be as clever and conniving as the femme fatale on HBO’s Rome but, alas, I lack such cleverness. Her descriptiion at the HBO site:
I suppose the only other way is to be like a Laura Bush — robotic, drugged, utterly repressed and in denial.
I’ve worked in quite a few restaurants over the years where the typically big-egoed narcissism of the owners mad ethem completely wacko.
The only ways to deal with them was to kiss their asses, become proficient at being invisible to them, or quitting. I wasn’t good at the first, resented having to do the second; consequently I did a lot of the third.
Bush has always been useless- he was so in TX when he was GOV- and he has always been so- I could do a better job than he does, if I was drunk,stoned and wacked on LSD.
res ipso loquitur?
Quite so!
This comment may be a ittle late. I’d assumed your use of the phrase “res ipsa loquitur” was a statement of your perspective. (I’d not realized it was the opening phrase in the diary.) Now I suspect you might have been inquiring as to the meaning.
Res ipsa loquitur means here that basically if something is screwed up that this is proof of the negligence, incompetence or dereliction of those purported to have the authority over it.
This link here is to a somewhat complicated site where the author examines and discusses in detail his perspectives on “Malignant Narcissism”.
This is dead-on Bush territory, descibing almost all his behavior and remoteness in the context of a serious central emotional and mental affliction.
Going through various topics listed on the home page, I’d recommend this one summarizing Narcissistic Personality Disorder, this one; Who is a Narcissist, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder Tips.
All of this describes Bush in a (wing)nut shell.
Personally I’ve felt that Bush’s inherent imbecility was his primary defining characteristic early on, coupled with dry-drunk syndrome, (typical of those who stop boozing but never deal with the difficulties that got them into alcoholism in the first place). Now, however, I think his previously less pronounced dysfunctional pathology has been exacerbated, weaponized, by the very sense of power he’s come to believe he has in the world.
From petulant village idiot to full-blown sociopath in 4 years is an extremely dangerous and volatile path when travelled by someone as ignorant as he. The dimensions of the threat he poses to the world are so great as to be incalculable.
.
WASHINGTON April 15, 2005 — The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism.”
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s office ordered “Patterns of Global Terrorism” eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush’s administration’s frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
“Instead of dealing with the facts, and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public,” charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert, who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in “The Counterterrorism Blog”, an online journal.
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year’s mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.
“This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it – or any of the key data – from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report.”
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was “categorically untrue.”
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Not unexpected, but unbelievable nonetheless.
And besides- he needs his nap-wtf? who in the world would believe that the prez of the US has to be so coddled?
This man has never taken responsibility for ONE dam thing he has ever done- and obviously that includes his children.
Because they are as useless and irresponsible as he is.
YOOHOO Jenna and Notjenna – maybe you could fuckin DO something other than run around running up bills in bars and not paying for them? YOOHOOO – just like your Daddy you are-the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I didn’t see the hurricane,
I was on vacation.
I didn’t see the levee crash,
I was on vacation.
I didn’t see the people drown,
I was on vacation.
I don’t look for trouble, I don’t see it coming,
If you’re down my way, you can join me in my bubble.
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[Slight edit - Oui]Do be careful on the pretzels!
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” his franchise player, senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, was on the disabled list for part of last week, working from home after being briefly hospitalized with painful kidney stones.”
The question that’s been on everyone’s mind. Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, friend or foe. How in the world could anyone, even George Bush, miscue so badly. How could anyone, even George Bush, ignore what was happening in New Orleans for days and days. Now we know. His brain was on the disabled list.