Have You No Decency Mr. President?
by Tony Norman
President Bush is fond of making comparisons between his governance of the nation during the war and Lincoln's stewardship of the republic during the Civil War.
He believes history will treat him better than his contemporaries who are, after all, bedeviled by the excruciating reality of the here-and-now.
Two nights ago while pleading with the nation to give his failed Iraq policies a chance to succeed by yet another infusion of blood and treasure, Mr. Bush assumed a haunted countenance.
Perhaps he found himself transported to Lincoln's era in a blaze of terrible insight. Perhaps he finally saw his own John Wilkes Booth lurking in the shadows of Ford's Theater waiting to ambush him.
If we're lucky, the fear in Mr. Bush's eyes was the faint glimmer of a conscience finally kicking in -- a belated but dim realization of the sacrifice he has asked the nation to assume until the next president takes the oath of office in January 2009.
He sounded unusually flat. Mr. Bush knew he was cornered between the exigencies of fate and his own hubris.
His grudging acknowledgment that "mistakes were made" is the kind of Nixonian passive construction that points to an intense desire to escape responsibility for his own policies.
At the lowest point of his presidency, Mr. Bush refuses to even fake the kind of self-criticism that other presidents have routinely resorted to in their search for redemption.
Lincoln knew all about being self-critical in public. He was a melancholic but thoughtful man who constantly weighed the implications of his decisions for both his nation in the midst of a brutal civil war and the ruthless judgment of history in its aftermath.
Lincoln is our greatest president because he told himself the truth about what his decisions meant for the country.
By comparison, Mr. Bush has yet to exhibit anything resembling deep empathy or soul-searching regarding the Iraq war.
Mr. Bush's rationale for an expansion of our military commitment is built upon the kind of abstraction that sent us searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction in the first place.
The blood spilled every day in Iraq isn't abstract. While most citizens are too polite to say it, Mr. Bush's preemptive "war against terror" killed more Americans than al-Qaida did on Sept. 11.
The best barometer of whether Mr. Bush believes his own rhetoric would be his announcement that his twin daughters have enlisted for a tour of duty in Iraq.
Say what you will about King Agamemnon's barbaric sacrifice of his daughter in Euripedes' "Iphigenia at Aulis," no one doubted his commitment to victory in the war against Troy. Can George Bush say that?
If former Sen. Rick Santorum is serious about tracking down "America's enemies" for the think tank that just hired him, he need look no further than the office of the President of the United States.
There, a feckless man with as little imagination as one can legally get away with in this life, is pushing our military into the spinning teeth of a bloody buzz saw.
In happier times, when he was able to bypass the cerebrum of the American electorate by asserting any nonsense that sounded good at the moment, Mr. Bush once articulated the importance of skepticism:
"There's an old saying in Tennessee," Mr. Bush said, not at all sure he was telling the truth even as the anecdote left his smirking lips.
"I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee," he said making one of his mid-sentence course corrections. "-- that says: Fool me once, shame on [pause] shame on you."
The president hesitated, wondering if he was about to make himself look foolish at the Nashville high school by mangling a cliche. After remembering he was in the presence of an adoring crowd, he soldiered on.
"Fool me -- you can't get fooled again," Mr. Bush said with an odd syntactical flourish.
It was an instructive moment that revealed his willingness to resort to the extremes of rhetorical hollowness to make a point while hoping nobody notices.
In a quote that has always been attributed to Mr. Lincoln, the great man once said a thing or two about belief in the eternal gullibility of the masses: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."
Are you listening, Mr. President? We don't believe you. This war is over. We lost.
Published on Saturday, January 13, 2007 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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