No More Mr. Nice Guy!

The Decider House Rules

That label, "The Decider", which the Chimp-in-Chief bestowed on himself tells us a great deal about his mindset.

For Junior, the name of the game is "making decisions" - not by calm reflection on the best available intelligence, not by listening to people wiser and more experienced than him, not by following a rational course based on sound principles, but by going on God or his gut. He makes a snap decision first, and then the facts and intelligence have to be fixed around it. And once the decision is made, he loses interest.

For Monkeynuts, making a decision is the same as carrying it out. It's up to the little people to implement the gory details, and if it turns out to be a bad decision, it's their fault - for example, the appalling blunder that led to the Iraqi army being disbanded. But in any case, once he has had his photo-op, once he has shown us the way forward, he gets bored and it's no longer anything to do with him.

Thus he can board his imperial starcruiser and take a jaunt down to Jackson Square in New Orleans (a couple of weeks after Katrina), proclaim that gazillions of dollars will soon be flowing into the region, and it's Mission Accomplished. Then when he hauls his sorry ass back there two years later, when nothing has been accomplished for the working people of the city, it never occurs to him that the peasants should be anything less than thrilled and a-twitter at this royal visit from the Potemkin President. It's not his fault that they're still living in a cesspit. He made the decision, what more do they want from him?

It's the same with No Child Left Behind, or the recent "comprehensive immigration reform" fiasco, or the war on Social Security, or anything else - Junior makes some snap "decision", then gets bored and moves on to do fresh damage elsewhere, because he has the attention span of an autistic mayfly.

Maha has an interesting discussion about the black hole of mindlessness, defensiveness and self-delusion that is inside Junior's head. Every day that goes by, I feel more and more strongly that Decider-Guy-in-Chief is Billy Mumy in the Twilight Zone - a spoiled brat who exercises his vast powers capriciously, neither knowing nor caring who he's hurting, how much damage he's doing. In the story, a man sacrificed himself, hoping to distract the other adults so they could rise up and kill the monster - but they were too cowardly, and the man, abandoned by his neighbors, got turned into some hideous abomination before being wished into the cornfield.

It will take sacrifice to rid ourselves of both Junior and the toxic, cancerous cabal that installed him as a figurehead, and will be around long after January 2009, even if the Chimperor voluntarily leaves office. Are we up to the task?