Fatal Hubris

If you have spent any time reading literature or history, you can find no shortage of leaders of both nations and companies who have come to believe in their own greatness and the infallibility of their judgments. They all come to ruin in the end, more often than not resulting in the crippling or outright destruction of what they once ruled.

In that thumbnail sketch is the short history of the Bush Administration. Led by a man who was in curious and surrounded by others who both praised him and who were convinced of their own infallibility, the Bush Administration had an opportunity that was handed it to become one of the great or near-great administrations. They not only missed the opportunity, they squandered it to the point that the only debate now is whether or not Bush will be regarded by history as either the worst president in American history or among the worst.

In essence, the early days of the Bush Administration focused on two men who had a long track record of despising democracy and winking at war crimes. Almost five years ago, the Toledo Blade ran a lengthy series about Tiger Force, a U.S. Army force during the Vietnam War that left a long and gruesome trail of atrocities and war crimes behind it. Two of the men who were instrumental in burying the record of those atrocities were two high-level officials in the Ford Administration: Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

The Bush Administration believed in their own infallibility, which is why they felt that, with the legal assistance of the Gang of Five, that they could disregard the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law, international law and the Geneva Conventions. They used the cover of a national tragedy to ram an extreme Right-wing agenda through a supine Congress (when they even bothered going to Congress), in an attempt to turn the societal clock back to the 1890s. They eventually overreached, foundering on the Social Security, when they tried to dismantle that system.

The problem for Bush is that infallibility falls to pieces at the first failure. It became clear to more and more people that the Iraq War was a clusterfuck. But that wasn't enough.

What was enough was Hurricane Katrina, which stripped the bark off Bush and exposed his Administration as a cabal of ideological idiots. Bush came across as both uncaring and clueless, praising people when it was obvious to everyone else, including, finally, Fox News, that the Federal efforts were a rife with failure, partisanship and incompetence. The Bush Administration used the efforts to recover from the two hurricanes (Rita soon followed) as a weapon against local Democrats. The Bush Administration could not even help Americans without trying to use aid as a weapon. The federal efforts in New Orleans were a sham at best and criminal malfeasance at worst.

It became clear to everyone that Kayne West understated the point: George Bush not only didn't give a damn about Black people, George Bush didn't give a damn about anyone.

Once the wheels came off the wagon of the Bush Administration, there was no putting them back on. Even if they tried to do it right, as in the recent floods along the Mississippi River, the best praise they could garner was: "Well, they're not fucking up as badly as they did in New Orleans."

But even with that, the collapse of the housing market, which was fueled by the active neglect of the Bush Administration and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (formerly the "Sage of Wall Street", now the "Guru of Greed"), drove home to tens of millions of Americans the point that the Bush Administration is driven by ideology, not by reality. Bush abandoned the housing market to the greedy fucks in the financial industry, and another Enron resulted across the nation, as people who knew better abandoned prudence in order to hawk worthless securities. Those securities were not "blue chips," they were worthless.

As a direct result of Bush's and Greenspan's beliefs that all regulation is bad, the world's economy came within a hairsbreadth of collapse and there is a possibility that it still may yet fall to pieces.

All of this is due in no small part to the hubris of the Bush Administration, which believed it could do no wrong.

Which is why the approval rating for the Bush Presidency is setting records for "lowest ever" whenever a new poll is announced. By the time the next president is inaugurated, George Bush may have an approval rating lower than that of brain cancer.