Why Andrew Why? I just don't understand...

I just read Andrew Sullivan's discussion of how Bush's "strength" might also be his weakness. It's a typically too-clever-by-half Sullivan analysis that almost completely misses the real point about why Bush needs to go, while at the same time once again reducing all liberal thinkers to about four idiotically simplistic types, and then arguing against the lame positions of those types as though they actually stood in for the actual thoughtful analysis of intelligent lefties. It's as annoyingly reductionist as when a liberal talks about the position of the mythological "Middle American". At least he refrains for the time being from suggesting that we're all "America-hating". That comes a few blogs later...

But what really kills me is when Sullivan dismisses out of hand the suggestion that the President is in any way a liar. For one thing, this is easily disproved, even with something as petty as Bush's insisting during a press conference that the White House had not put up the Mission Accomplished banner on the U.S.S. Lincoln, only to have to trot out Dan Bartlett in the next few days to say that, well, okay, maybe, yes actually the White House did... kind of... put up that silly little banner... Or when the President insists, not once, but TWICE, that we had to invade Iraq because Saddam NEVER LET THE U.N. INSPECTORS INTO IRAQ (followed up by Rummy insisting the same thing a few press conferences later). At moments like this, I'm suddenly so transported into an alternative realm, that, for a moment, for a brief second, I actually question myself... uh... maybe Hans Blix, Mohamed ElBaradei, and company really WEREN'T there after all! It's a neat psychological trick the President plays, and one, mysteriously, that the press barely registers. The President of the United States has just uttered a complete and total either a)delusion or b)lie - and no one bats an eye. No headlines the next day: President Insists UN Inspections of Iraq Never Took Place. Nothing. Not a blip. If it weren't for irate liberal bloggers, this little aberration would probably never have been noted at all.

More importantly perhaps are the lies and abuses that come out of the Administration at large, lies and distortions and near-criminal acts that under any other President would, rightfully, implicate the President himself directly. But, as a result of Bush's brilliantly executed strategy of hugely diminished expectations, no one ever seems to want to actually come out and suggest the simplest, most straightforward idea imaginable: that maybe Bush not only knows about (which would be bad enough) but actually is behind and/or actively approves of the following: the misstatement of the cost of Medicare to congress, the Valerie Plame scandal, the presence of the infamous sixteen words in his 2003 State of the Union address, and the long term cover-up of Abu Ghraib, etc. etc. ad nauseum. And yet, on the face of it, esp. considering how he endlessly refuses to take anyone to task for any of these unfortunate incidences, it would seem only obvious that he in fact knew exactly what was being done in each case. And the only possible alternative, that he is so out of touch with his staff that they can do such things, over and over, without fear of reprimand or firing, is only slightly less deplorable a quality in a President. But one has to choose either option A or option B. And Sullivan, only begrudgingly and under the duress of inescapable evidence, chooses option B. Barely. For Sullivan it is only that the President is so darn stubborn - a quality he is only beginning to concede might just possibly have its downside. Perhaps Sullivan values in the President (at least the President he has created in his own mind) exactly what he values about himself - a determination to hold on to a path, to "stay the course", regardless of how clearly the evidence might suggest that the path was misguided from the moment one set oneself to follow it...

Have to go to bed - getting up early for E3 tomorrow. It's a whole new brave new world of video games out there...