Point of Disorder

Unlike bloggers whom people actually read, I feel little need to post frequently, or even monthly apparently. My comments from last September still stand: this is an administration with its vile head sliced off, and the shrieking you hear is only the violent disgust of the sensitive witnesses and the horrified shouts of the trapped and dying.

I rouse myself from my unaccustomed self-satisfaction, the calm sense of being right in the overview that allows an undisturbed contemplation of the messy details, to offer an observation on one point that is becoming conventional wisdom without much merit, viz: that squalid little man’s popularity is tanking (and I still think 25% approval is the inevitable base) because of Iraq.

It is not as though he ever won-over a large portion of the electorate by evidence of merit, or ever tried to appeal to people whom he could not immediately sway with either the innate respect due the office or his folksy grin. Citizens certainly rallied ‘round after the 9/11 attacks, but it is almost as if he either didn’t care or assumed they had been there all along. No, his reservoir of goodwill was always pretty fucking shallow and, woe betide his dumb party, he never took the opportunity to fill it.

He and his crew provided plenty of chest-thumping and magic thinking which, thanks to Hollywood and TV, a good many Americans of the simple sort love and identify with first. And as long as the brand looked good, the marketing department prevailed. Well, the list of over-reaching actions, misunderstandings - both honest and willful - of events and plain old arrogant assumptions are too long and depressing to review here before breakfast. I will only observe that an administration which people believed in and which had done other things for the most part right could have gotten away with a little war in the Mid East that unreeled messier than advertised.