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Junior and Senior
 If
the Bush family were the Ford auto dynasty, George W. would be its
Edsel. Like many other people, I didn’t think much of his father as a
president, but at least the old man was a sane and decent human being, in
touch with reality
and  capable
of normal relations with others.
Apparently father and son are
hardly on speaking terms today. The old man must be appalled by his
son’s disastrous contempt for the lessons he drew from the first
Gulf war. Rightly or wrongly, Bush Senior started that war for a limited and
specific purpose, quickly achieved it, and brought the troops home.
It was a clear-cut victory on his
own terms, and he didn’t waste his winnings on a long, futile, bloody
occupation; nor did he give the neoconservatives the “regime
change” they coveted. He was content to defeat Iraq, leaving Saddam
Hussein incapable of threatening anyone. He had no grand ambition to
transform the Middle East. He didn’t seem to think God had anointed
him for such a destiny.
What a contrast with Bush Junior!
The son is self-deluded, messianic, intolerant of contradiction, isolated from
normal human contact, too stubborn to learn obvious lessons of experience. I
always thought the old man, whatever his shortcomings in office, would be a
pleasant next-door neighbor; I wouldn’t even want to live on the same
block with the son.
Rumors of the son’s foul
temper abound. It was recently reported that he snapped at an aide,
“Stop throwing the Constitution at me. It’s just a
g———d piece of paper.” That may be just a false
rumor. But nobody would have believed it of the father; it sounds quite in
character for the son.
And one thing that makes it
credible is that Bush Junior seems to pick flatterers for advisors, ensuring
that he’ll get only the kind of advice he wants. Harriet Miers is still
presumably giving him the same constitutional and legal counsel she always
has, assuring him that anything he wants to do, such as spying on U.S.
citizens, falls within his presidential powers. Odd, but not unusual, how a man
can call himself a sinner while remaining incapable of real self-criticism.
![[Breaker quote for Junior and Senior: The father's war and the son's]](2005breakers/051222.gif) As
secretary of state, Colin Powell seemed willing to
confront Bush Junior with unwelcome realities; naturally he was replaced by
the more complaisant Condoleezza Rice, who can be counted on to mouth the
boss’s shibboleths about democracy and terrorism. All the younger
Bush’s worst tendencies are reinforced, accentuated, and as they
now say “enabled” by such hardball players as Dick Cheney and
Karl Rove, two men nobody will miss.
“I’m a uniter, not a
divider,” boasted the president who was to make the Clinton years
seem an era of good feeling and who would, moreover, create a
near-consensus of anti-American feeling not only in the Muslim world, but in
Europe. Defying the world isn’t usually the best way to unite it —
unless, of course, you want to unite it against yourself. This too is
something it’s hard to imagine Bush Senior doing. He seemed to
content himself with one enemy at a time.
The self-described
“compassionate conservative” is neither compassionate nor
conservative, unless compassion is measured by Federal spending and
violating the Constitution is the way to conserve it. The great English
conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott made a basic distinction between
“nomocratic” and “teleocratic” governance: The
first means the impartial rule of law, regardless of outcome, whereas the
second uses law as a mere means of getting a desired outcome — the
sin Oakeshott saw in socialist-style modern regimes, which he identified as
“rationalism in politics.” It’s roughly the difference
between the market economy and the Five-Year Plan.
Such distinctions, which most of
us grasp intuitively, are far too rarefied for Bush Junior, who sees
government as a blunt instrument for getting your way. For him war is not
an aberration, but a model, the very fulfillment of his idea of social
organization. He has no other real concept, at least none he finds so
inspiring.
The marvel is that the elder Bush,
an imperfectly yet instinctively civilized man, could have produced so boorish
a son. He must feel a special kind of anguish as he beholds what his heir has
done to his country.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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