Greatness

by digby

As I'm watching the Dow tank once again, with footage of George W. Bush blathering incomprehensibly in the background, it occurs to me that I may have been wrong in seeing the Bush administration as the book-end to the Nixon years. All the corruption and arrogance and imperial design made me think this was a phenomenon of the baby boom era.

Now I'm beginning to think it's the bizarroworld version of Roosevelt. It started with a pearl harbor style attack and ended with an economic crisis. And at each turn, instead of meeting the challenge with creativity and intelligence, Bush exacerbated the problems and made them worse.

Somebody asked me the other day what would have been different if Gore had been allowed to take office. I said that he probably would have been impeached after 9/11 and President Lieberman would have pretty much done exactly what Bush did. The only difference would be that he wouldn't have politicized the Justice Department, not because he is against it, but because Democrats would never get away with such things even for a second.

Many of us knew that Bush was a disaster. The first time I saw him speak it was incomprehensible to me that the Republicans would try to sell someone this obviously inadequate to the country. It felt like the ultimate insult. And it was. Conservatives had so little respect for government that they sought to prove its irrelevance by installing a functional moron as president. The result is obvious.

I honestly don't know why anyone would want to be president at this point. But one thing we've learned: cataclysmic events may make a president, but there's no guarantee they are going to make him a great success. It's just as likely he (or she) will be an epic failure. This isn't something you want to take chances with. We should not elect incompetent boobs just because our inflated egos tell us that we are qualified to be president ourselves and so the country should elect someone who is "just like us."

Maybe we should start educating people to see politicians the way they see athletes. They certainly may have lots of opinions about what a team should do. But even the most egotistical drunk screaming obscenities from the stands doesn't truly believe that he's a better hitter than Manny Ramirez or that the team should hire a bunch of guys off the streets to play in the outfield. They have more respect for the game than that. It would be nice if citizenship required as much respect for the country.


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