Hypocrisy at its best

Things that George Bush does often piss me off. In fact, there are very few things he does that do not piss me off. His sleazy maneuvering and his empty threats and his crappy rhetoric and his attempts to insinuate that everything he has messed up since the beginning of his presidency is somehow the fault of Democrats, and the way he relies on a bunch of manipulative tricks to try to convince the (admittedly gullible and more often than not downright idiotic) American people that what he's doing is somehow right and necessary just infuriate me. They make me so angry that there is really nothing I can say to properly convey how much he pisses me off. I have no idea what he's thinking, if he's thinking at all, if he actually holds any regard for his role as the technical leader of the country, if he actually has any regard for the concept of democracy as something in which the elected leader enacts the will of the people, and whether he truly believes that what he's doing is good for the country, or for anybody at all. I really, honestly just do not understand the motivation beyond simple self-absorption and total oblivion for him to do the things that he does. He spends all this time talking about how he doesn't want a Democratic Congress to revert to politics and prevent things from getting done. He's busy trying to spin his veto of the war spending bill as the Democrats withdrawing funding and hurting American troops. He's all about spin and politics, and those are exactly the things for which he attempts to criticize his political opponents.

The list of specific things that he's done that particularly infuriate me is very, very long, and since I suspect that my blog readership has a fairly liberal bent, I won't bother enumerating them. But some of the heinous things he's done as president are so, so much worse than the thing that I'm upset about right now that I almost feel a bit foolish even being upset.

What I'm mad about right now is the fact that, knowing that he would not get the votes to obtain Senate confirmation for his nominee for ambassador to Belgium, Sam Fox, Bush waited until Congress went into recess and then used his power to make recess appointments to just appoint Fox anyway.

This makes no sense to me. I mean, it does in that it's a very clever way to get what you want without other people bothering you. It's sort of like a little kid cleverly choosing which parent to ask for permission to do something controversial: you know Mommy won't say yes, so you wait until she's not home, and then you go ask Daddy. Except in this case Mommy and Daddy wouldn't say yes, so Bush the Giant Little Kid waited until they both weren't home, then did what he wanted.

In what way is this good leadership of a democratic country? In what way is this representing the needs and wants of the people? Granted, he doesn't have to worry about re-election, but he does have to worry about his legacy, both in terms of how he will be written about in history and in terms of how the Republican party will fare in the 2008 elections. When his approval ratings are so low that he had to search high and low for Republican candidates who would allow him to stump for them in 2006, why would he take it upon himself to throw into the faces of the American people, one more time, that he's the president and even though they wish he weren't, there's nothing they can do about it? I can almost hear him cackling, "Nyah nyah nyah" at us as he deliberately ignores the wishes of the majority.

Obviously, he owes Sam Fox a huge favour, given that many people credit Fox with singlehandedly preventing John Kerry from winning the 2004 presidential election. And isn't it nice to know that political favours to horrible people trump the possibility of grasping at even a thread of the idea of democracy? Isn't it nice to know that even if Bush hadn't lied about WMD as a justification for the Iraq war, and even if he had just relied on the pure rhetoric of "spreading democracy," that he would be as hypocritical as ever? His lies and his lack of conviction in the bullshit that he says about democratizing the Middle East are already utterly transparent, but his inability to even pretend to care about the desires of the voting public in his own country just takes the cake.

This feeling of fury and impotence is one of the most frustrating combinations ever. 2008 cannot come soon enough.