Why Won't Dubya Apologize?
Botched 9/11 info, two botched wars, a gutted economy, global scorn. Why can't W be a man?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
©2004 SF Gate
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/04/21/notes042104.DTL
There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time sorry sorry sorry.
We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions on a daily basis because, well, we are just wired this way. Just ask Mel "Spurtin' Blood" Gibson -- I mean, how much more wrong can you get?
But then comes the hard part: We apologize. Profusely and maybe even a bit meekly, we ask for forgiveness or at least offer an olive branch and recognize our shared messy humanness as the thing that differentiates us from the saccharine sexless drone people of the world -- like, you know, Laura Bush. Shudder.
But then there's Dubya. He is, apparently, immune. He is perfect and flawless and without the slightest taint of guilt or error, and, despite looking like a bowl of Jell-O salad in a universe of divine tiramisu, he is, apparently, an angel of purity and light. It's true.
For here is Dubya, mumbling his way through another shockingly insulting news conference just recently, screwing up both his face and his intelligence data (again) and still a-huntin' for nonexistent WMDs in Iraqi turkey farms (?) as reporter after reporter asks him, point blank, why he won't simply come clean.
They ask him, repeatedly, why he cannot find a single mistake in any policy his slithery admin has unleashed upon the nation, much less confess to any rampant missteps and botched decisions and oily ulterior motives and blatant screw-ups regarding 9/11 and Saddam and WMDs and his fetish for warmongering and for rewriting intelligence data to suit his corporate needs, all while taking more vacations than any president in history.
His answer? Nope. Nossiree, no mistakes were made. In fact, we as a nation are more on track than ever and hey lookit my shiny new boots okey doke thanks fer comin' gotta run. Plants wilted, children cried, even semicomatose cats couldn't help but wince at Bush's weird deflections and alcoholism-grade denials. What a surreal and sad country we swim in.
Why won't Bush admit he got 9/11 at least partially wrong? Why won't he acknowledge, at the very least -- as even longtime egomaniacal terrorism wonk Richard Clarke had the calm cojones to do -- that the U.S. ain't perfect and the government could've done much (much, much) better and hey we're flawed and we're learning and sorry, everyone, for the bloodbath and the malevolence and the rampant ongoing death and the 100 dead U.S. soldiers in the past month alone?
It is not too much to ask. It is not wildly out of the question. Sure, everyone knows all politicians across the planet -- and U.S. Republican politicians in particular -- are genetically engineered to loathe truth, programmed from birth to shun responsibility and reject blame and screech at honest fact like Lynne Cheney denies her bodice-ripping lesbian fantasies.
But surely even politicians have limits. And surely one of his puppeteers must've told Dubya that, often, a politician's ratings actually rise when he admits to human error and faulty ideology. Richard Clarke's astounding contrition slapped the nation with the shocking proof that it can be done, gracefully and with potent honesty. Hell, even former FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted his bureau made mistakes and did the best it could, given the flawed info it had.
Maybe it's faux-macho Texas pride. Maybe it's dumb-guy humiliation, that feeling that if Bush admits to just one of his policy defects, it's a slippery slope toward admitting he hasn't had much of a clue as to what's going on in his administration since pronouncing our country's name as "'Murka" in his swearing-in ceremony.
Or maybe it's all about God. Maybe it's because Dubya still genuinely believes he's divinely inspired, that he's truly doing the Lord's work by sanctimoniously blowing the living crap out of ragtag nations and allowing American GIs to die for his administration's hollow and increasingly indefensible political stratagems, and to admit personal error is to admit error in his overall pseudo-religious worldview.
In other words: I am God's chosen one. I cannot possibly be wrong, because God cannot possibly be wrong. Dubya, have you met Mr. Gibson?
'Course, it doesn't stop with Bush. Who could help but recoil in savage colonic pain as a freeze-dried and well-crusted John Ashcroft plopped his pious, dance-free butt down at the 9/11 hearings and proceeded to spend three hours pointing his scraggy finger at the Clinton administration? Way to go, Johnny. Way to shoulder that intellectual acumen. Make this country proud, honey.
Who, furthermore, could not help but let out a groan of pathos as Condi Rice, friendless and alone and looking weirdly, increasingly mechanical and limp and completely drained of all feminine fire, dutifully lied her ass off and regurgitated policy and stood by her man?
Look. The ability to offer up honest apology is a gift. To apologize shows intelligence. It shows humanity. It is soft and honest and real, and to admit fallibility is entirely human and increasingly rare -- and, obviously, it is everything a hypocritical politician is not.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is, after all, too much to ask. After all, we as a nation have become jaded beyond words and have come to expect this level of appalling denial from our leaders, come to understand this as the overriding maxim of our time: We can never admit our country might, just might, be wrong.
There is simply no room for apology in American politics. There is no room for showing strength of character by admitting that our shiny all-American armor is, in fact, full of cracks and rust holes and is actually made by exhausted 10-year-old girls in a Malaysian sweatshop.
This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you might've made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well, that sort of humility doesn't sit well with the hawks and the corporate profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead soldiers in Iraq.
And there is, tragically, only more numb, shell-shocked citizens and weeping families of the dead, all begging for someone, somewhere, to offer up just a single note of apology, of contrition, of hope and common recognition of the sad tragicomic circus in which we all perform.
This is all anyone is really asking for from our leaders, finally. Just a glimmer of our shared messiness, a common understanding of our collective awe, a single hint of that most tragically rare of current commodities: humanity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Subscribe to Mark's deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
©2004 SF Gate
Botched 9/11 info, two botched wars, a gutted economy, global scorn. Why can't W be a man?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
©2004 SF Gate
URL: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2004/04/21/notes042104.DTL
There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time sorry sorry sorry.
We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions on a daily basis because, well, we are just wired this way. Just ask Mel "Spurtin' Blood" Gibson -- I mean, how much more wrong can you get?
But then comes the hard part: We apologize. Profusely and maybe even a bit meekly, we ask for forgiveness or at least offer an olive branch and recognize our shared messy humanness as the thing that differentiates us from the saccharine sexless drone people of the world -- like, you know, Laura Bush. Shudder.
But then there's Dubya. He is, apparently, immune. He is perfect and flawless and without the slightest taint of guilt or error, and, despite looking like a bowl of Jell-O salad in a universe of divine tiramisu, he is, apparently, an angel of purity and light. It's true.
For here is Dubya, mumbling his way through another shockingly insulting news conference just recently, screwing up both his face and his intelligence data (again) and still a-huntin' for nonexistent WMDs in Iraqi turkey farms (?) as reporter after reporter asks him, point blank, why he won't simply come clean.
They ask him, repeatedly, why he cannot find a single mistake in any policy his slithery admin has unleashed upon the nation, much less confess to any rampant missteps and botched decisions and oily ulterior motives and blatant screw-ups regarding 9/11 and Saddam and WMDs and his fetish for warmongering and for rewriting intelligence data to suit his corporate needs, all while taking more vacations than any president in history.
His answer? Nope. Nossiree, no mistakes were made. In fact, we as a nation are more on track than ever and hey lookit my shiny new boots okey doke thanks fer comin' gotta run. Plants wilted, children cried, even semicomatose cats couldn't help but wince at Bush's weird deflections and alcoholism-grade denials. What a surreal and sad country we swim in.
Why won't Bush admit he got 9/11 at least partially wrong? Why won't he acknowledge, at the very least -- as even longtime egomaniacal terrorism wonk Richard Clarke had the calm cojones to do -- that the U.S. ain't perfect and the government could've done much (much, much) better and hey we're flawed and we're learning and sorry, everyone, for the bloodbath and the malevolence and the rampant ongoing death and the 100 dead U.S. soldiers in the past month alone?
It is not too much to ask. It is not wildly out of the question. Sure, everyone knows all politicians across the planet -- and U.S. Republican politicians in particular -- are genetically engineered to loathe truth, programmed from birth to shun responsibility and reject blame and screech at honest fact like Lynne Cheney denies her bodice-ripping lesbian fantasies.
But surely even politicians have limits. And surely one of his puppeteers must've told Dubya that, often, a politician's ratings actually rise when he admits to human error and faulty ideology. Richard Clarke's astounding contrition slapped the nation with the shocking proof that it can be done, gracefully and with potent honesty. Hell, even former FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted his bureau made mistakes and did the best it could, given the flawed info it had.
Maybe it's faux-macho Texas pride. Maybe it's dumb-guy humiliation, that feeling that if Bush admits to just one of his policy defects, it's a slippery slope toward admitting he hasn't had much of a clue as to what's going on in his administration since pronouncing our country's name as "'Murka" in his swearing-in ceremony.
Or maybe it's all about God. Maybe it's because Dubya still genuinely believes he's divinely inspired, that he's truly doing the Lord's work by sanctimoniously blowing the living crap out of ragtag nations and allowing American GIs to die for his administration's hollow and increasingly indefensible political stratagems, and to admit personal error is to admit error in his overall pseudo-religious worldview.
In other words: I am God's chosen one. I cannot possibly be wrong, because God cannot possibly be wrong. Dubya, have you met Mr. Gibson?
'Course, it doesn't stop with Bush. Who could help but recoil in savage colonic pain as a freeze-dried and well-crusted John Ashcroft plopped his pious, dance-free butt down at the 9/11 hearings and proceeded to spend three hours pointing his scraggy finger at the Clinton administration? Way to go, Johnny. Way to shoulder that intellectual acumen. Make this country proud, honey.
Who, furthermore, could not help but let out a groan of pathos as Condi Rice, friendless and alone and looking weirdly, increasingly mechanical and limp and completely drained of all feminine fire, dutifully lied her ass off and regurgitated policy and stood by her man?
Look. The ability to offer up honest apology is a gift. To apologize shows intelligence. It shows humanity. It is soft and honest and real, and to admit fallibility is entirely human and increasingly rare -- and, obviously, it is everything a hypocritical politician is not.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is, after all, too much to ask. After all, we as a nation have become jaded beyond words and have come to expect this level of appalling denial from our leaders, come to understand this as the overriding maxim of our time: We can never admit our country might, just might, be wrong.
There is simply no room for apology in American politics. There is no room for showing strength of character by admitting that our shiny all-American armor is, in fact, full of cracks and rust holes and is actually made by exhausted 10-year-old girls in a Malaysian sweatshop.
This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you might've made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well, that sort of humility doesn't sit well with the hawks and the corporate profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead soldiers in Iraq.
And there is, tragically, only more numb, shell-shocked citizens and weeping families of the dead, all begging for someone, somewhere, to offer up just a single note of apology, of contrition, of hope and common recognition of the sad tragicomic circus in which we all perform.
This is all anyone is really asking for from our leaders, finally. Just a glimmer of our shared messiness, a common understanding of our collective awe, a single hint of that most tragically rare of current commodities: humanity.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Subscribe to Mark's deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
©2004 SF Gate
