Procrastinet

The Anti-Bush/Cheney '04 Platform

filed under: Stuff to be pissed off about

My admiration for Brad DeLong has clearly reached a point where my brain sends out unconscious signals which make him write about stuff I intended to write about but do it in way that's Jedi to my kid-with-plastic-lightsabre.

The second part of the issue I took up yesterday pertains to the valid, urgent reasons to be anti-Bush/Cheney as well as pro-Kerry/Edwards. Pondering that issue, I recalled my earliest objections to George W. Bush, which I garnered from a profile in Vanity Fair, published as the 2000 primaries were heating up.

The thesis of the article was that Bush made a point of delving only shallowly into any issue. He didn't want detail, or nuance, or depth. He wanted his advisors to give him a summary, maximum five pages, based on which he would make a gut decision. This was a point of pride to him; he and his supporters believed it made him an excellent, "strong" leader.

Problem is, of course, decisions about insanely complex issues that are made based on a limited understanding of them are likely to be wrong.

Or if not wrong qua wrong, even if they're based on a sound principal, it's likely that without further examinations they will be ineffective or counterproductive.

When you're the head of a well-cronied oil company and the decisions you make are counterproductive, the result is the business goes bust. When you're the Head of State of the most powerful country in the world and the decisions you make are counterproductive, the result is people die and you add to the world's proportion of misery.

Revisiting this issue last night, it occurred to me with new clarity that there was another downside to this executive philosophy: it allowed you to be easily manipulated without believing yourself to be manipulated. Those who want you to jump a certain way just have to control the summary of information you receive based on their knowledge of your prejudices and presuppositions.

Well, the DeLong article is a comprehensive survey of this issue, and lays out three theories of how the Bush/Cheney White House may actually run. It's a fascinating read.

As usual, the comments at the bottom are also of a pretty high class - comments on DeLong's site tend not to devolve as badly as those on the biggest of big blogs, and tend to consist of those more interested in rational examination than partisan kneejerks. Look, particularly, for Lee A.'s comment (the twenty-fourth or so) about the administration policymakers' dawning realization that they have gambled and lost - I could not agree more, and I appreciate that he resists the easy demonization that characterizes a lot of leftish commentary.

Posted by rjt at July 9, 2004 09:56 AM