Is Bush Incompetent – Or The Last Resort?

(FP’ed 3:20 AM EDT, Thursday, October 11, 2007.

This question will be the defining question of the GWB Presidency…if we all survive the future. (spoken like a true ex-history teacher.)
– promoted by exmearden)

I have to admit that as stupid as I sometimes portray Bush, I really have problems with the idea that he is incompetent.

I doubt that anyone incompetent has a chance of becoming president, unless they are so unbelievably stupid that they really can be just a hand puppet.

I think it would show publicly more than it does, and I doubt he’d be able to carry off his deceptive ‘just a dumb good ole boy’ act if he was that stupid.

Bush is a clown definitely, but I think stupid clown is a gross over-simplification.

Owning the World – The Great Illusion:

In the sixties and seventies, a group of right-wingers in the United States formed a society of vindictive and power hungry men who thought they could reinvent reality. Initially they received little notice and operated inside the American Enterprise Institute; that think tank became the womb for these megalomaniacs and their monstrous ambition of remaking the world. Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz were among them and the movement was to turn into a preposterous beast…

As the group assumed greater visibility, they established their goal as the creation of an artificial world which the U.S. empire would rule single-handedly. Ignoring history, they were set on creating an illusory world, one where they alone would set the rules, decide who would run big corporations, who would dominate the world scene, who would control the enormous oil wealth of the Middle East and Central Asia, who would dictate the fate of the world – without taking into consideration the ambitions of the rest of the world or the aspirations of human beings. This virtual universe began to turn into a frightening reality decades later when these men managed to seize power. And they did this through manipulating the Supreme Court into appointing a clown as President, a marionette to serve as their front man. The clown didn’t have to do anything other than smirk and occasionally lift his hand in a fist; they knew that would be enough to impress the world and, in particular, the American people. Oh yes, and he would pretend to be one of the people, just like your cousin Dave or your next-door neighbor.

Joshua Muravchik, American Enterprise Institute:

We got lucky with Reagan. He took the path we wanted, and the policies succeeded brilliantly. He left office highly popular. Bush is a different story. He, too, took the path we wanted, but the policies are achieving uncertain success. His popularity has plummeted. It would be pigheaded not to reflect and rethink.

But we ought to do this without backbiting or abandoning Bush. All policies are perfect on paper, none in execution. All politicians are, well, politicians. Bush has embraced so much of what we believe that it would be silly to begrudge his deviations.

Calling Bush incompetent I think is making a too dangerous assumption.

Calling Bush incompetent I think might be dangerously minimizing and masking real and deeper issues:

Absolutely convinced we possess the right to pursue our “happiness” and “security”, regardless of the cost to the Earth and the rest of its sentient inhabitants, we US Americans are in a race to hoard the most toys, to eat the most food, to have the most orgasms, to be the best looking, and to be the biggest winners as we engage in a repugnant orgy of narcissistic and gluttonous hedonism.

We wage war perpetually, strip the world bare like a swarm of locusts, and give virtually nothing in return. Ensuring our “happiness” and “security” extracts a tremendous price from the rest of the Earth.

Since it rose to military and economic hegemony at the close of World War II, the United States, its proxies, an array of US-installed ruthless reactionary tyrants, and the World Bank have worked in concert to slaughter, torture, and impoverish untold millions of human beings in the “developing world” in an endless quest to satiate our plutocracy’s insatiable thirst for power and treasure.

Bush, his henchmen, and their multitude of war crimes are not anomalies.

Cross-posted from Edgeing