Bush's Intellectual Process

Before I started this blog, I kept a journal. This entry is so appropriate to the revelations about Bush ordering electronic surveillance that I went and recovered it:

"Sunday
February 15, 2004
3:45 AM

Erica brought me Friday's LA Times Calendar section, which contained a review of three books critical of Bush's Iraq war. One of them quotes Bush telling a Palestinian diplomat that God chose him to be the president who would be in office when the 9/11 attack occurred and to attack Afghanistan and Iraq.

Later, Saturday morning, I pulled Vol. 2 of Bill Warren's book Keep Watching the Skies off the shelf to read his review of Panic In Year Zero, and then skipped around reading a few other reviews. Then I came to this sentence in Warren's critique of the film Kiss Me Deadly:

"Hammer never bothers to justify his actions-he never questions them, so no justification is necessary."

That's the essence of Bush's intellectual process, if it can be called that. He has no self-doubt. Legal justifications and rationales don't precede a decision, they come after the fact for public consumption only.

It Can't Happen Here? Like Hell It Can't

“The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by dumb shyster lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.''

Fascist President Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip in Sinclair Lewis’s prescient novel, It Can't Happen Here.

"This politician, a 'Professional Common Man,' executes his rise by relentlessly attacking the liberal media, fancy-talking intellectuals, shiftless progressives, pinkos, promiscuity, and welfare hangers-on, all the while clamoring for a return to traditional values, to love of country, to the pie-scented days of old when things made sense and Americans were indisputably American. He speaks almost entirely in 'noble but slippery abstractions'-Liberty, Freedom, Equality-and people love him, even if they can't fully articulate why without resorting to abstractions themselves."