Throughout the years of the Bush administration, I've frequently found myself confounded by his actions. No simple answer ever presented itself. Why would he so blatantly and obviously screw up so often, and with such reckless abandon?
Was he an idiot? Nah, he strikes me as about average.
Was he evil? Probably, but that doesn't explain everything.
What could be driving this man to do the obviously counterproductive, destructive, and disasterous things that he does?
And then the answer hit me. I'm not the first one to say it, but maybe the first one to say it in this way...
George W Bush is a man desperate to fail.
His whole life has been defined by failure. Failure in College. Failure in his first election. Failure in the military. Failure at business. And every time he failed, his dad was there to come and bail him out. Take drugs? It'll get covered up. Alcoholic? Patched over. Lose millions of dollars in the oil business? Dad's rich Saudi friends are there to cover for you.
Think about how that would effect a man. With a mother like Barbara "Beautiful Mind" Bush and a father who was a war hero, a spy, and a multimillionaire, how do you rebel? What do you do when they simply pat you on the head and sweep it under the rug?
You fail on a scale so large even your Dad can't bail you out.
So what do you do? Let a city drown. Start a pointless war against the same guy your Dad fought. Use that war to bankrupt the country and crush the military. Shred the constitution. Polarize the country and develop conventional warhead ICBMs so you can start World War 3.
You're reading Daily Kos, so you can probably think of a thousand things I didn't mention just now for that list. Things that Bush did that make no sense unless your objective is to screw up the country and the world so bad that it'll take decades to fix it.
All so Bush can finally go to his Dad and say, "Lets see you fix that you old bastard."
But of course, no failure will ever be big enough. Not until the world is a smoking ash heap. This drama we've been caught up in isn't about oil, it isn't about red states and blue states, it isn't about corporations and neoconservatives. Its all about a son trying to rebel against his father, and dragging the world down with him.
Welcome to the Oedipus Administration.