Letters to the Editor

• What Loyalty is for Bush: A psychological fig leaf

  [Read the article: All hail the king]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  My thursday mornings start with an eager anticipation of an SB article. This one was exquisite and bang on the money for me.

  It's been 7 years since we have first clapped eyes on the vacant and pointless 'visage' of George Herbert Walker Bush's eldest son. Savvy followers of politics will have seen him or heard of him in his earlier cameos. What have we learned in that time?

  I would posit the following

  Bush's presidency is about loyalty because it's not about anything else. It is content free in the sense that the difficult policy answers and analysis are always jettisoned in favour of the path of least complexity and purest cronyism [another warped form of loyalty], no matter how disastrous the consequences might be. Sycophants are promoted, independent thinkers are sidelined, groupthink isn't some disastrous unconcscious affliction, it's promoted by design and ruthlessly enforced.

  In the real world, loyalty is a magnificent attribute and sane people everywhere enjoy dispensing loyalty and receiving it. Honourable people don't try to turn loyalty into the most exalted of virtues because it implies a reign of madmen. If what you were doing was so noble why would you have to insist on loyalty all the time? It also implies an rigid hierarchy were 'leaders' do the stage strutting and the minions have no other contribution than to look admiringly. Two other famous entourages held loyalty in great esteem, Hilter's and Saddam's. Churchill was busy fielding internal squabbling in his cabinet all the time. When the cost of the war got too expensive others naturally got demoralized, so he used argument and he crafted those speeches. We learn from Andrew Roberts that Dubbya thinks he's Churchill. I mean, what can anyone serious say to that?

  The Whitehouse team has been furiously on-message for all this time, this is mandated by the 24/7 media scrutiny where it has become deemed that any divergence of views makes an administration look incompetent. Politicians would rather mouth any absurdity these days rather than being accused of being at odds with a colleague, hence you have all the same forumulations, "with respect this is not how I read his speech", "that is not what my colleague meant...". A craven and hollow character like Gonzales has calculated that it is less costly to his 'dignity' (he has 0 integrity) to insult the intelligences of roomfulls of smart and attentive people than to engage seriously with what he is being asked. He knows that a conscious plan to fire attorney generals has had disastrous political consequences. He will never admit to having been part of such a base and nakedly partisan plan. His only resort is a kind of emotionalism where he makes cloying appeals to the senators to not impugn his 'integrity'.

  Wolfowitz: 'don't impugn my integrity'. Blair: disagree with me over Iraq but don't impugn my 'integrity'. Tenet: we made mistakes at the CIA but don't impugn my or their 'integrity'.

  It goes on and on. When a minion is thrown to the wolves to shore up an unbelievable case occasionally they are as barmy as a Jon Bolton (whose hyper-articulacy always astounds me for someone so certifiably insane) i.e a true believer or they decide that the price of loyalty is now too high. "I can't sit here with these smart people and just repeat my talking points they'll flay me alive" so you get the Comeys and the Sampsons (and Paul O'neill) who are then have to be 'fucked' over the way that Rove and Wolfowitz and half-men everywhere habitually threaten to do. Of course this is a double-edged sword for to be seen to be that ruthless is something that you then have to 'deny' lest you turn off the moralistic base.

  In the real world, the horrifying results of their decision-making is there for a planet-full of people to see, so the psychological fig leaf of 'loyalty' that they insist on works only inside their own warped minds.

  There is one thing I've been repeatedly heartened by in life and that is that if you walked into any office on the planet and said "compile me a list of the assholes that work here" if anonymity was ensured, there would always be a very high degree of agreement on the candidates, we all know what's going on. That thought alone, should keep George up beyond 9pm, if only, he's far too exhausted by dealing with his own inner demons to worry about us or anyone else for that matter.

  Permalink Thursday, May 17, 2007 03:07 AM