Excellent Essay--says it all

EXCERPT: it is with laughter, gloating and gleeful anticipation that things will indeed get even worse for all the potential victims involved that I note Bush's latest bit of news-making -- "Listen, we've never been stay the course" in Iraq, as he recently fibbed to ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Nearly inconceivable is that even devout Bush boosters will swallow that hogwash, but swallow it they will. Why? Again, that has to do with nearly unplumbable human behavior -- the irradicable preference among some to live in utter, abject ignorance and simply follow the lead of authoritarian sleaze.

Manipulative, hypocritical sloganeering has always been one of Bush's fortes, because it comes naturally to the complexity-reducing, authoritarian type. It's pithy and easily digestible, requiring no thought whatsoever among intended consumers, especially the base. And slogans are so damn easy to shuffle and modify.  During the 2000 campaign, for instance, before he realized that five hypocrites could dispense with messy democracy and simply appoint a dictator, Bush shuffled slogans as quickly and easily as a deck of Iraqis-wanted cards.

Starting with read-my-lips, not-my-position-papers "Compassionate Conservatism," he jumped to "Prosperity with a Purpose" when some began asking why they should trade the proven prosperity of Clinton-Gore for a flop of a businessman. When things looked grim after his New Hampshire primary loss to reform-talking John McCain, Bush then decided he was a "Reformer with Results." Then, knowing he harbored no really good plans for real people, Bush hung the banner: "Real Plans for Real People." (Swear to God I'm not making this history up. It's in the books.)

Laughing and crying at the same time

by P.M. Carpenter

I have always found the hardest part of writing about the Bush administration is the twofold problem of decorum and guilt. There's the urge to laugh at its utter ineptitude, but there's also the very real human misery that its towering ineptitude produces like popcorn. And there's the urge to gloat at its predictable failures -- we really did tell you so -- but those failures also mean untold human misery. And of course there's the urge to gleefully anticipate more failures, despite the resulting misery, although I tell myself that that urge is actually just the well-intentioned hope that exposed failure heaped on exposed failure will forever turn the electorate off the kind of criminals we have in charge.

My training is in history, not the sociopsychology of human behavior, but I suspect there's some truth in the speculation that laughing at Bush's misery-quotient is a perverse, mirror-image emotion of Gore Vidal's admission that "Every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies." Bush is no friend, for sure, and just as sure, he's scored no successes, but even in that long-ago time of friendly political competition, sadness over a foe's success -- especially one producing a popular, social good -- was a natural, inescapable feeling. Watching failure (in this case) is pure ecstasy.

It's human nature. We're a seedy little species, and I take pride in confessing that my seediness bows to no man.

So yes, it is with laughter, gloating and gleeful anticipation that things will indeed get even worse for all the potential victims involved that I note Bush's latest bit of news-making -- "Listen, we've never been stay the course" in Iraq, as he recently fibbed to ABC's George Stephanopoulos.

Nearly inconceivable is that even devout Bush boosters will swallow that hogwash, but swallow it they will. Why? Again, that has to do with nearly unplumbable human behavior -- the irradicable preference among some to live in utter, abject ignorance and simply follow the lead of authoritarian sleaze.

If you haven't read John Dean's excellent exchange with Robert Altemeyer, a sociopsychology expert on pathological gullibility, I recommend you do. Building on Theodor Adorno and others' groundbreaking work of the 1940s, Altemeyer lays out some living, breathing, voting human realities in our midst:

"Authoritarian followers ... haven't thought about things to any great degree and then decided what they believe in," he tells Dean. "To maintain their beliefs in a world of challenging discoveries and conflicting beliefs, they associate as much as possible with others who agree with them. They travel in small circles, getting booster shots of faith from one another. They rely upon social support, rather than evidence or logic, to keep on believing what in many cases they've simply memorized. But this makes them quite vulnerable to manipulators who tell them what they want to hear.... Since the in-group is made up of followers clinging to each other and looking for a leader, it's pretty easy for an unscrupulous person to take over."

Altemeyer compares the "amoral" personality of authoritarian leadership such as Bush's to that of "faith healers" and "enterprising evangelists," who strive for "personal power" through "manipulating others, exploiting the gullible, intimidating, cheating, and being a hypocrite," since these behaviors are "justified if they get [the leaders what they want]. They say one of the best skills a person can develop is the ability to look someone straight in the eye and lie convincingly. They say the world is full of suckers who deserve to be 'taken' because they are so stupid" -- a major theme of faith-initiator David Kuo's recent, and hard-learned, exposé.

Manipulative, hypocritical sloganeering has always been one of Bush's fortes, because it comes naturally to the complexity-reducing, authoritarian type. It's pithy and easily digestible, requiring no thought whatsoever among intended consumers, especially the base. And slogans are so damn easy to shuffle and modify.

During the 2000 campaign, for instance, before he realized that five hypocrites could dispense with messy democracy and simply appoint a dictator, Bush shuffled slogans as quickly and easily as a deck of Iraqis-wanted cards.

Starting with read-my-lips, not-my-position-papers "Compassionate Conservatism," he jumped to "Prosperity with a Purpose" when some began asking why they should trade the proven prosperity of Clinton-Gore for a flop of a businessman. When things looked grim after his New Hampshire primary loss to reform-talking John McCain, Bush then decided he was a "Reformer with Results." Then, knowing he harbored no really good plans for real people, Bush hung the banner: "Real Plans for Real People." (Swear to God I'm not making this history up. It's in the books.)

On the heels of "Real Plans for Real People," Bush mixed it up with "Real Purposes for Real People" and "Real Tax Relief for Real People," finally deciding he actually offered "Real Savings for Real People." The cymbal-crashing crescendo came when his stunningly obvious divisiveness prompted the deliverance of a "Uniter, not a divider."

So just you wait. Bush is hard at work at a replacement slogan for "Stay the Course." It's sure to be a humdinger, full of things-will-change promise, signifying nothing.

And yep, even though the new slogan will effect no new strategy, no improvement and even more victims, I, as a fallible human, and as shameful as it is, will laugh and gloat and gleefully anticipate even more of Bush's destructive ineptitude. Because years ago, a lot of us told you so.