Letters to the Editor
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The inadequacy of being a post-hoc Cassandra
This article, while skillfully written, fails to provide any real direction for mitigating the crises it laments or avoiding the crises it predicts. The time has long since past when it suffices to intelligently describe the train wreck of this Administration. Insightful writers such as Kamiya should instead turn their thoughts and pens to how to get the country and the world through the next 18 months.
One way to start doing that is to avoid too much overwrought handwringing, as exhibited in passages such as describing al Qaeda as "far more intractable" a foe than the Soviet Union. Seriously? The Soviet Union's stated goals were global communism, and in their heyday they comprised, controlled, or patently influenced dozens of nations and had one of the most potent armed forces in the history of the planet. Al Qaeda, by contrast, remains a largely covert and disjointed assemblage of ideologues, which would, if left alone, nevertheless be faced with fierce resistance from Shiites and moderate Sunnis, whom al Qaeda adherents view as apostates and heretics. To conflate the two is to drink too deeply from the delusional cup of George W. Bush.
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No Reason, No (or very little) Faith
I have always maintained that Bush's supposed fascination with fundamentalist Christianity has been grossly overstated. This guy (and those like him) actually has very little in common with your bible-beating aunt or most middle-class Americans of any religion.
The guiding force behind his behavior had been nothing other than a grandiose sense of entitlement, or what we could term as a kind of "favorite son" syndrome. Simply put, we're talking about someone who has never had to take a job just to "pay the bills," has never had a middle-management position that required compromises with both corporate leadership and lower-lever employees, and has always had the freedom to just "try stuff out" without fear of loss of income or status.
Any deference he pays to conservative religious views are strictly a matter of convenience and courtesy to people who just happen to reinforce whatever he (or the guys around him) want to do. In short, pretty much what any rich kid does when they're put in charge of something infinitely beyond their own abilities.
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Keep harping on the mistakes
There are a couple of related complaints being made that 1) We should stop all this boring and repetitive enumeration of the problems caused by Bush, and 2) We need to talk more about what we should do to fix these problems. Both are bad ideas.
We can't just let "history" take care of Bush because he's still here. He's still doing damage, and he's got a year and a half of more damage to do. His mistakes may be obvious to you, and sorry if you're bored by them, but not all that many Americans understand the seriousness of them. We can't just dismiss Bush and talk about what to do next because most people consider "more of the same" to be a valid option for what to do next!. We haven't even convinced most Americans that we need to do something different, despite what the polls say. We all know what's about to happen: Republicans and the media will keep telling us that things are going well in Iraq, Bush will stay the course and probably accelerate it, and collectively the American public will say "Alright, let's give it another chance." And it's quite possible that Bush will be succeeded by a Republican president who essentially changes nothing. So we have no choice now but to keep shouting about what a mistake this all is because I'd argue that choosing the best option is not crucial (or even possible) until we get this one off the goddamn table.
Also, insisting that we must figure out how to fix the mess we created just repeats the mistake of assuming we can control everything. We can't make the Middle East the way we want it to be, and we don't even have the power anymore to guide the outcome of events. What we need to do now is minimize the damage and make the best of what happpens. That's a hard lesson to learn, but it's incontrovertible.
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Enough with the faith excuse
Oh puhlleazzz!! Our current POTUS, as fine and gilded an example of arrested development as you'll ever witness, plays the faith card like Amarillo Slim at table of Vegas suckers and the MSM and even Salon writers scoop it up. As someone who grew up around the oil patch, Bible thumping version of spoiled trust funders that is Shrub, his faith is a crutch, an enabling force for his own narcissistic, Frat boy, dumbed down brand of elitist hubris. It's not something that guides and inspires him; it is a tool: to gloss over his addictions, and give some delusional sense of justification for his own deep and contradictory feelings of insecurity and entitlement. Think this is just pop psychology? Then tell me why even his harshest critics often are perplexed and struggle to understand and explain his reasons and goals six years into this mess of a Presidency? They can't because it's only explanation is at the level of an emotionally stunted dry drunk with an Oedipus complex who gets away with literal murder because the MSM and even writers like Kamiya are loathe to think he is a bad person - he just CAN'T be because he is a person of FAITH. If he keeps Gonzales, Miers, etc., it's because he is loyal, they say. A saner view is that a personality like his requires sycophants to keep him propped up - doesn't that explain why he won't let Gonzales go (his inner sycophants circle keeps getting every smaller) when it makes no political sense? He needs Gonzales, badly. George Bush is a very, very small man and deep down he knows that. The only way to change things is to remove him from the equation, either by impeachment or stopping funding.
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Um...
>In the last few weeks... a disturbing thought is rising to the >surface: There may be no way to clean up the mess he has made.
Gary, I really like your writing, but I'm hoping you're not speaking for yourself or most of the readers here.
Many/most seemed to know this was going to be an uncleanupable mess as soon as the action started. At worst, we just didn't think it would be *that* big - or at least, hoped it wouldn't. Despite the right's statements to the contrary, we want our dour & nasty predictions to be unnecessary concern and not just the tip of the iceberg.