Rove's Al Zarqawi in Sri Lanka Strategy-The Terrible Two's

[nascarblue]

It’s hard to make sense of Bush’s duck-and-cover tactics as the horrible news began to pour out of South Asia. “His aides,” according to the New York Times, “said it took <72 hours> to understand the magnitude of the tragedy and to plan a recovery effort that must stretch from remote villages of Indonesia to the eastern coast of Africa.”

But all it took was a newspaper to understand the magnitude of it; and the notion that a full scale plan must be worked out before this president can speak out on a subject is of course ludicrous. Consider, for example, the public concern Bush expresses for the future of social security and the closeness with which he holds his plan to destroy it.

Rove’s polls no doubt show that a substantial portion of the Bush base makes little distinction between Muslim fundamentalists and any other dark-complected Other. In Vietnam, similar simpletons would write on their helmet covers, “Kill ’em all and let the Lord sort ’em out.”

But there wouldn’t be any political harm to Bush in making nice over a tragedy that makes 9/11 look like the highway death toll over Labor Day weekend. His simpletons would not hold it against him. They are not so simple that they can’t tell when his fingers are crossed.

Nor is it likely that Bush doesn’t want to announce grandiose and costly plans which he has no intention of carrying out. For this has been — except in the areas of preemptive war and the cutting of taxes on unearned income — his entire scheme of governance.

Bush is not a subtle man, though, and it’s probably a waste of time to look beyond the obvious in trying to understand him. All those little brown ones are boring, and it’s hard work being president in case nobody knows it and it’s my vacation and you can’t make me do anything I don’t feel like doing because I’m the president and you’re not the boss of me.

Bush’s indifference to the tragedy becomes perfectly understandable once we get over our reluctance to believe that the president of the United States is a spoiled, stubborn and self-centered brat whose development was arrested, unfortunately for the world, in the Terrible Twos.