Unlike father

As you might have noticed, my muse has deserted me today, so I've spent my free time looking for words of wisdom from my fellow bloggers.

I just happened upon a doozy.

Ever wonder, in an idle moment, how a nasty dunce like George W. Bush could possibly become President of the United States?

Jerome Doolittle over at Bad Attitudes nails the answer:

Mission Almost Accomplished

It's been nearly four years since I first posted my analysis of the nasty psychopathogy that has forced George W. Bush to fail all his life, and is causing him to fail so spectacularly now. Consider this from the Washington Post (emphasis added):

"Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992."

The younger Bush's career can only be understood as a lifelong obsession with disappointing the father he so plainly hates.

He follows his father's footsteps in school, as a pilot, as a businessman, and finally as a politician. Unable to fill those footprints, he makes each one seem unimportant by pretending contempt for it. He gets C's where his father got A's; he ducks the combat flying that made his father a hero; he burns through the seed money his father's friends gave him, failing in the oil business which had made his father rich.

Then at last he was taken in hand by a sleazy political op who realized that the father's name and money would be enough to elect the wayward son governor of Texas. (Polls at the time showed that a significant portion of the voters thought that W. actually was his father.)

Then Rove set out to hand-carry his meal ticket into the White House itself.
Take that, you old fart, junior must have thought as he took the oath of office Any asshole can get to be president. But even that wasn't enough. Deep inside, where the Oedipal snakes writhed in his subconscious, there was still work to do.

What better to way to humiliate his father than to degrade the supreme office the old man had spent his life to reach? What sweeter revenge than to slime, like a slug, the presidency itself? And so he enlisted Rumsfeld and Cheney, his father's ancient enemies, to help in the work of patricide.

Outdoing his father as president, the junior Bush must have known in his heart, was beyond his limited capacities. But his whole life offered proof of his ability to fail, and so he took the only path remaining. He would become, God help the rest of us, the worst president in history.

I love thinkers like this. Check out Bad Attitudes. Thanks, Jerome.