Tuesday, in his thundering criticism of Bush on Iran and the NIE, Joe Biden raised the enduring question of Bush’s presidency. "If that’s true," Biden said speaking of his claim to have not seen the NIE draft until a few days ago, "then he is the most incompetent president in modern American history." And if not, by implication, the president is lying.
This enduring puzzlement is reflected throughout the political commentary community. Is he corrupt and evil? Or is he merely a bumbling, incompetent fool? Although the latter answer has been harder to sustain as his presidency has dragged on, the conclusion of corruption or evil is not satisfactory either. Maybe it is not about the individual, for if it were, things might have been expected to change more directly after Rumsfeld and Gonzalez and others were replaced. That such changes are not forthcoming indicates something deeper worth thinking about.
At the time of yesterday’s charade of a press conference, I was reading Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt illustrates how the totalitarian ruler becomes intransigently dedicated to the fiction he creates, for to do otherwise leads us to ruin of the organizational apparatus which supports his power and leadership position.
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