by Christopher Brauchli
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.
- Wm. Shakespeare, King John
No one likes to admit to being dull, so occasionally the task of making the observation falls to others. George Bush is a case in
point. All his friends tell us his is a keen mind that cuts right to the quick. Since many of them have known him since prep school
people tend to believe them even when the evidence is overwhelming that he is in fact one of the country’s duller presidents. The
evidence is most often presented by his tongue that, embedded in an otherwise empty chamber, by its wagging gives voice to the
vacuousness of his thought
One of its finer moments was during the New Orleans disaster. On the Thursday after New Orleans was wiped out by hurricane
Katrina, Mr. Bush, invited a friend over for lunch. His choice of a luncheon companion at the time there were 25,000 people huddled
in the Superdome in New Orleans without food, water or sanitary facilities and looting and a general crime spree were in full flower,
was a strange one. Of all the people he might have invited to help him decide what to do, he, bereft of ideas to the extent he’d tried
coming up with any, invited the 78-year-old Alan Greenspan over. Whatever Mr. Greenspan’s skills, flood control and clean up are
not among them. Not that that mattered. Relieving the distress of the people directly affected by the flood was not what was on the
president’s mind. As always, what was on the president’s mind was money.
Describing his luncheon conversation with Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Bush was quoted in the Washington Post as saying: “We particularly
spent a lot of time talking about the damage done to our energy infrastructure and its effect on the availability of the price of
gasoline.
In our judgment we view this storm as a temporary disruption that is being addressed by the government and by the private sector.”
That was the kind of reassuring talk from a commander in chief that people who were homeless, starving and surrounded by dead
bodies floating in the water, needed to hear.
Mr. Bush is not, of course, the only dull one in his administration, he is simply the leader. FDA Commissioner Lester M. Crawford is
another. On September 1 Mr. Crawford claimed a prominent role in the administration as a man of exceptionally little ability and an
exceedingly small mind. He did it by announcing that he was confronting a dilemma he was unable to resolve without further study.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0910-23.htm
dp
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
