As I read and thought about this article, which I found poignant, I thought about a conversation I had a year or so ago with a friend who is a psychotherapist, and, I would guess, a very good one. She said that when she first meets a client and the client asks, "What will I get from this?" her answer is, "You will get an inner life." I was surprised to hear this, since I thought that an inner life is something we all have. She told me that she knew it would be very hard for me to imagine, but to trust her when she said that a lot of people don't have one. They don't replay, imagine, doubt, recriminate, or wonder about what might have been. It truly is hard for those of us who spend much or most of out lives inside ourselves to imagine a life without these things. But the question how it is that our President can do all he has done and still remain so small has, I think, its answer in this startling fact: there are people who have no inner life, and he is one of them.

Mr. Keillor made a lot of good points about President Bush, but I wish he could have resisted the urge to spout a string of gratuitous cliches about federal workers. Depth and sensitivity are usually his hallmarks, so I doubt that he is hiding a familiarity with government work for the sake of making a point; no, he seems rather to be demonstrating the willful ignorance that is so common when the subject of federal workers comes up. Certainly there are wasteful programs and lazy workers to be found if one looks hard enough -- in government or the private sector. But to tar everyone here with the same brush is uncalled-for. I would like to see the reaction from Mr. Keillor and all the other cynics out there if the government stopped doing everything it does. Failing that, it would be nice if Mr. Keillor dropped the folksy, snide attitude and learned more about the system his taxes support.

Thank you Garrison. Beautifully put and on point about a tragic situation for us and for those who come after us.

One big quibble on "The Little Man" on 02/08:

"Most of us sense that when, decades from now, the story of this administration comes out, it will be one of ordinary incompetence, of rigid and incurious people overwhelmed by events in a world they don't dare look around and see."

Ordinary incompetence?

No way.

Clearly this is incompetence of historic proportions.

So many failings, and failures, in only 5 years.

Amazing.

It's 26 days of vacation and 13 days of sick leave, in addition to all those holidays. Best leave arrangement around. Corporate America sucks by comparison.

Mr. Sable attributes the little man's presidency to the absence of a viable Demo candidate. Au contraire, I, as did a majority of voters, thought Al would have made a splendid president. Unfortunately, we were overruled by the Supreme Court. On a different subject, Anne's impassioned defense of dedicated government employees who labor in the trenches where the actual work of government is performed (as opposed to the opportunists and political hacks who populate some of the cushy suites at the top) was superb.

I very much enjoyed the recent article on our aberrant President written so exquisitely by Garrison Keillor. This man (GK) is a consumate wordsmith who writes from a vast storehouse of intellect , compassion and humor. His article concisely points out that this "emperor" really IS butt nekkid. The problem the Democratic Party has is a lack of leadership (aside from the woefully inept maunderings of Messrs Dean, Kerry, and Kennedy) who can keep the American voter focussed on the shortcomings and gross incompetencies of the Bush Administration and create a new image for our party to carry into the next election. Perhaps the Democrats should hire Mr Keillor to write some speeches and some programs. GK for President?

History will not remember him at all. He will be the Millard Fillmore of the new millenium. And, actually, it's nice to get that special form of mediocrity out of the way so soon in our millenium. Come to think of it, maybe i'm being unfair to Millard Fillmore.

Mirrors crack with laughter when you walk by. How does it

feel to be such a tool?

I hate to say it, but I'm writing to disagree with Mr. Keillor. Not because I think Bush is a great leader, but because I think that everything Bush has done has been planned with the idea of dismantling the government as we know it. I simply cannot believe a man can be elected president who is stupid enough to stay on vacation when the worst national disaster hits our shores. Clearly, this has to be part of a plot to prove the imbecility of having any kind of faith in elected officials.

Even before 9/11, Dick Cheney was on a mission to bring the presidency back to the kind of power it had 30 years previously (do the math - this takes us back to the Nixon administration - surely Cheney knew that we reined in presidential powers precisely because of Nixon?!) According to Cheney, the American public has no right to know how oil company officials (like the now-disgraced Ken Lay) influenced the development of the U.S. energy policy. We don't even have the right to know which oil officials were involved.

These are the people who, when we discovered there were no WMD in Iraq, turned their destructive energies into outing a covert CIA operative, instead of attempting to reform the agency that gave them such horrifically bad intelligence (though there are CIA operatives who are claiming now that the administration was so hell-bent on invading Iraq that they simply weren't interested in the truth.)

So while I hate to disagree with Mr. Keillor, I don't believe small minds can paint with such broad, masterful strokes. Sadly, this is an administration that is using its capabilities to destroy the visionary example of freedom and democracy that America can and should be.