Jesse at
Pandagon links to
this article in the NYTimes about the Congressional Black Caucus meeting with President Bush yesterday. When I read it, the first thing that struck me was the nonchalant way this sentence appeared in the middle of the article:
White House officials say the idea should appeal to blacks because they have a shorter average life span than whites and end up putting more money into the retirement system than they take out.
The administration keeps saying this and I don't understand a world in which they don't have to worry that it will bother anyone. Tossing off the fact that a particular group of our citizens don't live as long as others should lead to all sorts of conversations, about poverty, health care, crime...and private Social Security accounts should not be on that list.
I want every Democrat (and/or every person of conscience) who appears on television during this debate to quote that justification and point out how callous, cynical, and cruel the use of that statistic is..
Jesse was struck by this sentence:
Mr. Watt said Mr. Bush seemed surprised by some of the statistics he was given on how black Americans were lagging in income, employment and health insurance coverage.
and I was too, because it reminded me of
this Molly Ivins column from 2003, which describes Bush perfectly.
In order to understand why George W. Bush doesn't get it, you have to take several strands of common Texas attitude, then add an impressive degree of class-based obliviousness. What you end up with is a guy who sees himself as a perfectly nice fellow -- and who is genuinely disconnected from the impact of his decisions on people. ...
The Reverend Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal, a network of churches that fight poverty, told the New York Times that shortly after his election, Bush had said to him, "I don't understand how poor people think," and had described himself as a "white Republican guy who doesn't get it, but I'd like to." What's annoying about Bush is when this obtuseness, the blinkeredness of his life, weighs so heavily on others, as it has increasingly as he has acquired more power.
There was a telling episode in 1999 when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual statistics on hunger, showing that once again Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger because we have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be first in poverty, first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in poverty, first in the percentage of adults without a high school diploma, 51st in income per capita, and so on.
When the 1999 hunger stats were announced, Bush threw a tantrum. He thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state look bad because he was running for president. "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas." You would, wouldn't you? That is the point at which ignorance becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time with people in the colonias, South Texas' shantytowns; he had never been to a session with Valley Interfaith, a consortium of border churches and schools and the best community organization in the state. There is no excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality of Texas.
And there is no excuse for a President to be unaware of...well, everything. Bush's deliberate cluelessness is nothing less than criminal. The man took an oath, and every day that he blocks himself off from information about the citizens of his country (and the countries he's invaded), he breaks that promise.