The Unfeeling President

I know I've linked to this essay by E. L. Doctorow before, but it seems particularly appropriate today. With all of the analysis spent on Bush, doesn't it just as often come down to the fact that when you look at the man, when you watch him give a speech or interact with others, this sensation of dullness, of emptiness, of absolute disconnect from the gravity of his office, and of a lack of simple basic human empathy, emanates from him in depressing waves. Paul O’Neill in his comments about working with Bush seemed to confirm this from close-up. The truth of course is that a person and their motives are ultimately unknowable - we can only intuit what is going on inside from what we see on the outside - but this essay seems to hit very accurately on the palpable lack of genuine human warmth and empathy that follows this President like a stench. And Doctorow’s castigation of the President’s talent for mouthing empty platitudes in speeches with a sincerity casually donned for the occasion is a perfect skewering of exactly the kind of speech that Bush delivered today: a predictable gruel of a speech filled to the teeth with a constant stream of exactly the kind of rhetoric that, while on the surface expressing sentiments that every American should be proud to support, has instead, through endless Pavlovian repetition and through the shadowy, misleading, sometimes straightforwardly dishonest acts of his own administration over the past four years, been rendered entirely devoid of actual meaning and moral force.