Playing President or Red, White and Screwed

Every time I see Dubya on TV... I think, "MY GOD, how did we get such a human failure as the leader of our country?"  No matter how many times I see his face I still question, "WHY? HOW? and WHAT the...?"   It seems that when the Bush Neocons  took over the reins, our nation  has been steadily steered  in the direction of ruin.

Dubya, an empty shell of a man, makes me so ashamed... His style, which is somewhere between "rainman" and "soupy sales" (soupy...you might have to be an American Boomer to remember him) is laughable to put it mildly.  A buffoon, decreeing a buffoon ideology.  He tries so hard to come across as a tough, righteous, man of God but winds up looking like a vulnerable, morally bankrupt, man of disrepute.

The comedian, Lewis Black says it best:

Uh, I listen to George Bush every day, and I realize, that one of us... is NUTS! AND, it's not ME!! Here's how you know... he's crazy. When someone speaks to you, and their words don't match their face... they're INSANE!! When he talks about the war in Iraq, he smiles sometimes. YOU CAN'T DO THAT!! Not unless you do a joke like "Two Iraqis walked into a bar, hahahaha." - Red White and Screwed...

Highlights from "Lewis Black: Red, White and Screwed"

 

Now, back to the reason for today's post...  I saw Robert Scheer touting his new book on Democracy Now, "Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton- and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush."

I believe, this is the best affirmation of  Dubya's character and why he is so dangerous to, we the people and democracy itself... Please read this excerpt and click link at bottom to read the whole interview with Amy Goodman.  Thanks, thinkingblue

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Amy Goodman: And how does he compare to Bush today, George W. Bush?

Robert Scheer: Well, my point in that subtitle, which you've read a few times, that they did not prepare me for Bush, is all of these people had led a life, okay? Reagan had been born in the Depression. His father lost his job. He went to work for the New Deal. Reagan had had to scratch his way through college and get jobs and make a living. He was the head of a union. He had actually had to work his way up in Hollywood. He cared about the issues. He cared about what was going on. He followed what was going on in the world.

This was certainly true of Richard Nixon, who was the best prepared president. He had been vice president. Richard Nixon, you could say, "Bulgaria." He would tell you the five different factions in Bulgaria, you know, where they stood and what their history was. He would have been able to tell you the whole story I just told you about Mossadegh. He would have known it in great detail. It doesn't mean he did the right thing. He had the opening to China. He still killed millions of people in Indochina, stopping communism while he was drinking Mai Tais with Mao Tse-tung. So he was still capable of enormous dangerous contradictions.

Clinton, obviously the smartest, maybe the smartest of all of our politicians. The reason he wrote a letter criticizing me is, I called him a right-of-center. I said he'll be remembered as a great president, but a right-of-center president, bringing us back to the center. I would say that this - in physics, they say quantitative change suddenly produces a qualitative change. You heat water, it becomes steam.

We've had the trivialization of our politics going on ever since we had electronic media. We've had the photo-ops and the dumbing down and the one-liners, and everything. But it hit a critical mass with George W. He is the first perfectly electronically transmitted president. There is no there there. Here is a guy who came in, he wasn't even the one his father wanted to be president. He had no real interest. He - you know, we don't pick senators because they have a track record. We pick governors from states where governors don't do anything, like Jimmy Carter from Georgia, George W. from Texas.

So here was a guy who must have arrived that first day thinking, "How did I get here? What do I do?" And he basically turned it over to people he thought would allow him to one-up his father, that great psychological drama that we're suffering through, and he turned it over to Cheney and to Rumsfeld and to the neo-cons, which is a real cabal. They've been meeting together. They've been preparing position papers together.

We have lots of good documentaries now out on this. Greenwald's Uncovered, I think, is an excellent one. The other one I saw the other night, Hijacking 9/11. There are many of these things. They're right. People have a right to question how this happened. But clearly, these people hijacked the government with a very narrow ideological view. They excluded the old establishment, the Brent Scowcrofts and that group. And they went in a very dangerous direction. He went along with them, because there is no there there. There is no George W. Bush. Here is a person who is totally disinterested in the world, uneducated. I'm not saying he's stupid. I don't think he's stupid. He's crafty as hell, but he projects well on television. And that's the real big problem. He is the perfect "what, me worry?" president.

Amy Goodman: Well, Robert Scheer, I want to thank you for being with us. Robert Scheer, columnist for many years, fired from the Los Angeles Times, now writing at the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as at his website, TruthDig. And his new book is called Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan and Clinton, and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. CLICK HERE TO SEE AND HEAR THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW. CLICK HERE TO READ IT ON TRUTHOUT

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