It's easy to make fun of the fact that Bush's staff is taking its time bringing Bush up to speed on the state of the war in Iraq, but I'll tell you, if it was my job, and I had a boss with limited intellectual capacity and a blatant lack of inherent curiosity, who shows a tendency to hold on to an ideee fixe as long as possible, and who has also has a quick temper and an apparently huge lack of self-confidence, I'd probably do the same thing. If I was tasked to educate Bill Clinton, for instance, I'd lay it all out for him, the pros and cons and all the complexities, because Clinton clearly has the capacity to perceive the whole picture and pick out and give proper weight to each element, and then make a decision based on the information provided, which he would have processed quickly and completely in a short amount of time.
Bush, on the other hand, can't do that, and if you give him the whole picture all at one time, he's just going to dig his heels into the ground and refuse to accept it. He'll reject the new information because it doesn't accord with his old ideas about what's happening, so you have to begin by undermining those old perceptions and replacing them with new ones. That you do not all at once, but little by little, so that Bush can live with each new piece of the puzzle and get used to it without feeling as if the new data is threatening his worldview, and therefore his being. (This is especially true if the staff, in fear over inadvertantly trangressing ideologically-determined hard no-go lines, has been reinforcing that old worldview for years.)
Using a step-by-step process, Bush can basically sleep on each new revelation, and come to the next day's briefing with it as part of the accepted background. His lack of intellectual ability means that he won't notice that the totality of what he knows at the moment doesn't make real sense (because it's incomplete and perhaps even self-contradictory) and also that he'll rarely make a bold conceptual leap ahead of what he's being told, so there's little danger of him seeing that his previous conception is gradually being undermined and replaced with a new one. There may be moments where his anger will rise up and he'll want to know "Why wasn't I told this before?," but advisors at the Presidential level should be able to dance around that one -- at the worst, dropping a bunch of new information in advance of his preparedness to receive it should confuse and distract him.
The question of whether any of this will make any difference at all is a good one -- if you look at the public statements coming from the White House and the Pentagon about a "new way forward" and a need for tens of thousands of more troops, I rather think that it won't -- but I don't think you can fault the staff's methodology. That it comes so late in the game, that it has taken so damn long for the Administration to realize that its current policies aren't working, that's a legitimate complaint, but there is no way, given the way the Bush Administration is run, with an obvious attraction to strict authoritarian hierarchy, that staff and advisors could have done this any earlier. It was necessary for Bush to have his nose rubbed in the doo-doo sufficiently to provoke even a semblence of an openness to change, and until that happened, there was no way anyone could push Bush off his preferred pathway (unless it came from Dick Cheney, and he's such a total Neanderthal that he's probably in his undisclosed location right now, brooding about the advisability of nuking Iraq back to the Stone Age).
It's unlikely we're going to get the kind of change we need, but if there's any hope of any change at all, Bush's staff seems to be going about it the right way. (Of course, who knows what the hell they're telling him.)
absolutist
aggresive
anti-Constitutional
anti-intellectual
arrogant
authoritarian
blame-placers
blameworthy
blinkered
buckpassers
calculating
class warriors
clueless
compassionless
con artists
conniving
conscienceless
conspiratorial
corrupt
craven
criminal
crooked
culpable
damaging
dangerous
deadly
debased
deceitful
delusional
despotic
destructive
devious
disconnected
dishonorable
dishonest
disingenuous
disrespectful
dogmatic
doomed
fanatical
fantasists
felonious
hateful
heinous
hostile to science
hypocritical
ideologues
ignorant
immoral
incompetent
indifferent
inflexible
insensitive
insincere
irrational
isolated
kleptocratic
lacking in empathy
lacking in public spirit
liars
mendacious
misleading
mistrustful
non-rational
not candid
not "reality-based"
not trustworthy
oblivious
oligarchic
opportunistic
out of control
pernicious
perverse
philistine
plutocratic
prevaricating
propagandists
rapacious
relentless
reprehensible
rigid
scandalous
schemers
selfish
secretive
shameless
sleazy
tricky
unAmerican
uncaring
uncivil
uncompromising
unconstitutional
undemocratic
unethical
unpopular
unprincipled
unrealistic
unreliable
unrepresentative
unscientific
unscrupulous
unsympathetic
venal
vile
virtueless
warmongers
wicked
without integrity
wrong-headed
Thanks to: Breeze, Chuck, Ivan Raikov, Kaiju, Kathy, Roger, Shirley, S.M. Dixon
recently seen
i've got a little list...
Elliott Abrams
Steven Abrams (Kansas BofE)
David Addington
Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson
Roger Ailes (FNC)
John Ashcroft
Bob Bennett
William Bennett
Joe Biden
John Bolton
Alan Bonsell (Dover BofE)
Pat Buchanan
Bill Buckingham (Dover BofE)
George W. Bush
Saxby Chambliss
Bruce Chapman (DI)
Dick Cheney
Lynne Cheney
Richard Cohen
The Coors Family
Ann Coulter
Michael Crichton
Lanny Davis
Tom DeLay
William A. Dembski
James Dobson
Leonard Downie (WaPo)
Dinesh D’Souza
Gregg Easterbrook
Jerry Falwell
Douglas Feith
Arthur Finkelstein
Bill Frist
George Gilder
Newt Gingrich
John Gibson (FNC)
Alberto Gonzalez
Rudolph Giuliani
Sean Hannity
Katherine Harris
Fred Hiatt (WaPo)
Christopher Hitchens
David Horowitz
Don Imus
James F. Inhofe
Jesse Jackson
Philip E. Johnson
Daryn Kagan
Joe Klein
Phil Kline
Ron Klink
William Kristol
Ken Lay
Joe Lieberman
Rush Limbaugh
Trent Lott
Frank Luntz
"American Fundamentalists"
by Joel Pelletier
(click on image for more info)
Chris Matthews
Mitch McConnell
Stephen C. Meyer (DI)
Judith Miller (ex-NYT)
Zell Miller
Tom Monaghan
Sun Myung Moon
Roy Moore
Dick Morris
Rupert Murdoch
Ralph Nader
John Negroponte
Grover Norquist
Robert Novak
Ted Olson
Elspeth Reeve (TNR)
Bill O'Reilly
Martin Peretz (TNR)
Richard Perle
Ramesh Ponnuru
Ralph Reed
Pat Robertson
Karl Rove
Tim Russert
Rick Santorum
Richard Mellon Scaife
Antonin Scalia
Joe Scarborough
Susan Schmidt (WaPo)
Bill Schneider
Al Sharpton
Ron Silver
John Solomon (WaPo)
Margaret Spellings
Kenneth Starr
Randall Terry
Clarence Thomas
Richard Thompson (TMLC)
Donald Trump
Richard Viguere
Donald Wildmon
Paul Wolfowitz
Bob Woodward (WaPo)
John Yoo
guest-blogging
All the fine sites I've
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Be sure to visit them all!!
recent listening
influences
John Adams
Laurie Anderson
Aphex Twin
Isaac Asimov
Fred Astaire
J.G. Ballard
The Beatles
Busby Berkeley
John Cage
"Catch-22"
Raymond Chandler
Arthur C. Clarke
Elvis Costello
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Philip K. Dick
Kevin Drum
Brian Eno
Fela
Firesign Theatre
Eliot Gelwan
William Gibson
Philip Glass
David Gordon
Stephen Jay Gould
Dashiell Hammett
"The Harder They Come"
Robert Heinlein
Joseph Heller
Frank Herbert
Douglas Hofstadter
Bill James
Gene Kelly
Stanley Kubrick
Jefferson Airplane
Ursula K. LeGuin
The Marx Brothers
John McPhee
Harry Partch
Michael C. Penta
Monty Python
Orbital
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
"The Prisoner"
"The Red Shoes"
Steve Reich
Terry Riley
Oliver Sacks
Erik Satie
"Singin' in the Rain"
Stephen Sondheim
The Specials
Morton Subotnick
Talking Heads/David Byrne
Tangerine Dream
Hunter S. Thompson
J.R.R. Tolkien
"2001: A Space Odyssey"
Kurt Vonnegut
Yes
Bullshit, trolling, unthinking knee-jerk dogmatism and the drivel of idiots will be ruthlessly deleted and the posters banned.
Entertaining, interesting, intelligent, informed and informative comments will always be welcome, even when I disagree with them.
I am the sole judge of which of these qualities pertains.
E-mail
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Corrections
I correct typos and other simple errors of grammar, syntax, style and presentation in my posts after the fact without necessarily posting notification of the change.
Substantive textual changes, especially reversals or major corrections, will be noted in an "Update" or a footnote.
Also, illustrations may be added to entries after their initial publication.
the story so far
unfutz: toiling in almost complete obscurity for almost 1500 days
If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.
If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.
(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)
Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.
