ozymandias.jpg

Christy made a post recently that discusses the Hobson's Choice that The Deciderer is going to have to make very soon — and of which he and his advisors seem to be blissfully unaware.  Then again, they seem to be blissfully unaware of a lot of things.

This is why those out there who think that Bush won't veto the Iraq timetable/spending bill are mistaken.  Of course he'll veto this bill.  It doesn't matter whether it's got a binding deadline for withdrawal or not.  He rejects even the appearance of chastisement by others:  The Emperor, like the Pope, is infallible.   Note his aides' desperate efforts to push Alberto Gonzales into resigning so that he doesn't force Bush to tacitly admit, by firing Gonzales, that he was wrong to hire him in the first place.  Note how he rejected the velvet-lined lifeline tossed to him by the Iraq Study Group as a "flaming turd". 

He doesn't think he'll pay a price because he and his inner circle have lived very sheltered lives.  That platinum-plated cocooning and lack of real-world hardening (does anyone think that these people could run a drugstore, much less the country, without either serious cheating and/or their mommies and daddies standing ready to bail them out by any means necessary?) has made them incapable of understanding just how badly off they are.

Bush and his advisors are fifteen-year-old trust-fund babies in the bodies of mature men and women.  They never have had to face, on a deep and personal level, the consequences of their actions; their mommies and daddies (and/or the friends of their mommies and daddies) have always been around to bail them out.   Now the kids may resent this, and may even try (as Bush has tried for all his life, with his rejecting of the advice of his daddy's friends in the Iraq Study Group being just his most recent bit of adolescent rebellion) to pretend that they don't need their parents' or their parents' friends' help, but they wouldn't be where they are without it.  As befits their eternal immaturity and combined dependence on and rebellion against their parents, their political philosophy is nothing more than a raised middle finger to everything that is espoused by anyone who might try to make them operate under any sort of restraint.

Because of this, they simply cannot conceive of the possibility that they are in the process of destroying not only themselves, not only the Republican Party, but the entire conservative movement.  Their brains just can't even entertain such a possibility.  But it is there. The main (if not only) thing propping them up right now is their heavy influence/control of the TV and radio outlets from which most Americans get their news — and with the rise of progressive radio, Keith Olbermann, The Daily Show and Colbert Report, and the reality-based portion of the blogosphere, even that influence is weakening.

I expect that, when the history books are written on Bush and his crew, the righties will — if any are left — be desperately trying to pretend that he didn't exist, as will be the non-righties that assisted and enabled him.  It'll be like trying to find someone in July of 1974 willing to admit to voting for Richard Nixon in November of 1972.   Eight years and a war will be glossed over as the high school textbooks leap nearly seamlessly from President Bill Clinton to President Barack Obama.   Even now, the Cons are trying to pretend that He's Really Not One Of Them.  Our own little brain-dead Ozymandias will be all but effaced from history, his power gone as utterly as that of the historical Rameses to which Shelley's poem refers.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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  3. Cancer on the Brain… and a Perspective on Health Care
  4. Gonzales and Bush Haven’t Spoken
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