The Bush Touch

June 6, 2006

Even President Bush’s most severe critics must give him credit for one thing. He has kept his promise.

Politicians are notorious for breaking their

Today's column is "The Bush Touch" -- Read Joe's columns the day he writes them.

promises — juggling fiends that palter with us in a double sense, one might say. And Bush himself has been known to shade the truth.

But on one occasion he gave us his word and has proved stunningly faithful to it. When he was reelected two years ago, he said (I quote from memory here), “I have political capital, and I intend to spend it.”

And man, has he spent it! I’m sure he wasn’t speaking ironically — that’s not his style — but his words have proved truer than he could have known. He was sitting on top of the world, and today, if opinion polls mean anything, his name is already accursed.

One gossip tabloid is even reporting that his marriage has broken down. If that’s a fiction, as we must presume it is, it’s the kind of fiction he now inspires, just as Babe Ruth inspired legends of promises to hit home runs for dying boys.

(I pause to note that there are no such legends about Barry Bonds. Maybe the gossips will someday report that he tried to save a kid’s life with a steroid injection.)

Today everything that goes wrong is blamed on the president, even by people who used to support him. Even the talk-radio hosts are turning against him. When he was popular, they used to defend everything he did, but illegal immigration has given them the chance to dissociate themselves from him now that he has lost his magic.

Surely Bush is horrified by the reports that U.S. Marines slaughtered woman and children in Haditha last November, but this is his war, and he can hardly say he didn’t intend atrocities. Richard Nixon didn’t intend the My Lai massacre either, but he couldn’t avoid responsibility for it.

[Breaker quote for The Bush Touch: Everything you want -- and then some]

[Breaker quote for The Bush Touch: Everything you want -- and then some]

In politics the gods answer prayers mercilessly. King Midas craved gold, and he got it — more than he wanted, as it turned out. Yet we still speak of the “Midas touch” as if it were a blessing.

Maybe we should begin to speak of the “Bush touch” for what happens when a powerful ruler gets everything he wants without being able to imagine the consequences. Myth and history alike offer the same grim lesson: Very well; you’ll get what you want — and then some.

This is tragedy in a nutshell. A man covets the crown and ignores the dark warnings that come with it. He commits or commands murder, thinking he’ll get away with it. And maybe he does, up to a point. He may think a murder, or even a war, won’t be blamed on him or will even bring him glory as a hero of his country and a benefactor of mankind. He exults in apparent victory. But the story isn’t over.

Americans don’t really believe in tragedy. It’s something they had to read in high school, then forgot like a dull sermon. It has nothing to do with their own lives, does it?

If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow, and which will not ...

Delphic lines! But we brush them aside and get on with the business of empire, which we call defending freedom and spreading democracy.

Fortune’s wheel keeps turning as ever, the mighty are brought low again, and yet it always takes us by surprise. Bush went to business school in the Ivy League, but you can do that without acquiring a sense of tragedy. You can go on thinking you can pragmatically improvise your way through life, ignoring omens and portents as fables for children.

Bush’s folly, however obvious it may seem now, is all too typical of his country. Through its elected representatives, America has spent its capital, disregarding all warnings and dooming its children to debt and worse. In a few years it will be almost unrecognizable. We can only hope bitter lessons will finally be learned and something can be built on the ruins.

Jesters do oft prove prophets, and I hope my prophecies turn out to be jests. I’d love to be wrong, but I’m afraid this blessed country has already used up its blessings and is about to find out the hard way.

Joseph Sobran

Copyright © 2006 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate,
a division of Griffin Communications
This column may not be reprinted in print or
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