Friday, June 17, 2005
Now Think Really, Really Hard Here...
Here at stately Wayne Manor the well-appointed HQ of Mercury Rising, I, Phoenix Woman, am wrestling desperately and sweatily with the following question:
If, when the Bushistas took over, the "grownups" were then "now in charge", could someone please tell me who then immediately afterwards hauled the grownups down to the cellar in Ekaterinburg and liquidated them?
Because I can tell you one sure thing about the Bushistas: They ain't grownups, any of 'em. None of them are the least little bit emotionally mature.
See, emotionally mature people believe in things like "diplomacy", "compassion", and "discussion". Immature people of any age vastly prefer being rude, bullying and insulting.
Under Clinton, we had a State Department staffed with people who were adults emotionally as well as physically mature. They negotiated with the paranoid and bellicose Kim Jong Il, and kept him from making nuclear warheads. We also had a reasonably good standing in much of the rest of the world.
Under the Bushistas, the mature people were frozen out in favor of jerks like John Bolton. They believed that threats and bullying -- even when (or in most cases, especially when) we couldn't back up the threats -- would work better (or at least be more fun!) than boring old diplomacy. After all, the US is better and bigger than the rest of the world, so we should be able to screw a few faces into the dirt just for fun, right?
Well, there's nothing much wrong with that concept, except for the fact that as Atrios and Charles Dodgson have noted, it doesn't freaking work -- because North Korea, which had no nukes when Big Soppy "I Feel Your Pain" Clinton was in charge, now has at least half a dozen in the Era of Big Manly Man Flightsuit Bush.
And just like in school, they have their sycophants. In the present case, their biggest suck-ups are in the mainstream media, supplemented by hordes of other suck-ups in the Republican Noise Machine.
This sounds like it might be bad, and it is, but since they are stupid jerkwads, they have vulnerabilities. They can be beaten, and they will be beaten.
And we will not have to wait as long as Nelson Mandela did.
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