Dangerously Distracted

All kidding aside about President Antsy-Pants’ need for the toilet, Ezra registers a very real concern about Bush’s apparent tendency to be easily and dangerously distracted once something gets too wonky or too difficult. Ez calls it the “merging of his ADD and Great Man of History pretensions,” and I think that’s a spot-on description of what causes Bush to so frequently disengage. It’s either plain old boring, a bit (or a lot) too complicated, or doesn’t offer the requisite level of potential glory-mining that will help define that beauteous legacy he’s determined to have. Says Ez:

What worries me is that he's already extracted his Manichean satisfaction from [the Iraq] confrontation and, now bored by its inexorable descent into sectarian division, is willing to leave the Iraq cliffhanger floating and move onto the next cosmic clash. Little could be more dangerous. One of the requirements for holding the modern American presidency should be the possession of a serious attention span. If you want to engage in the sort of global remodeling that Bush does, it needs to be near inhuman -- they should be able to synthesize Ritalin from your nail clippings. That George seems more interested in knocking down the blocks rather than slowly, carefully, putting them back together is quite scary. That he seems ready to play Godzilla on another set is downright terrifying.

Not only does he seem ready, but it also seems like they’re using the same damn script (hat tip Blue Meme). The WaPo reports that members of the administration are making the rounds with an hour-long slide show called “A History of Concealment and Deception,” designed to convince foreign diplomats that Iran’s nuclear program will be able to produce functional nukes quite soon (despite evidence to the contrary). Luckily, not everyone’s being taken in by it, and one hopes that the justifiable hesitancy to unquestioningly embrace Bush administration alarmism over WMDs will prevent a repeat of the debacle in which we’re still mired in Iraq. (Let’s leave aside for a moment that we’re in real danger of becoming The Country Who Cried Wolf, which is the topic for a whole other post.) That they are even contemplating such a course of action is, quite evidently, insane, but talk about method in the madness—Bush is bored, his approval is tanking, and the only thing he and his handlers know how to do to combat bad polling is orchestrate some cockamamie grand gesture, because the only thing they can do competently is politics.

It is, quite literally, the recipe for a disaster.

Tonight, Bush is slated to give an address from New Orleans. No doubt it will be filled with his usual rambling nonsense and empty, subtly self-congratulatory platitudes, but I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if, beyond detailing the grand (old) plan to rebuild NOLA as Neo Orleans (as it has been cleverly dubbed by The Green Knight), he starts to lay the groundwork for the Next Big Thing. After being forced to squirm his way through a half-assed acceptance of responsibility for Katrina, and feeling unloved by the peeps so soon after being given his spectacular mandate, Bush is just a petulant bundle of pent-up frustration, and he’s gonna need some blocks to knock down pretty soon to soothe the beast within.