Bizarro President

"The first Bizarro...appeared in Superboy #68 (November, 1958). Bizarro was a pathetic, quasi-living creature, who had come into being when a device supposedly capable of duplicating physical objects was used on Superboy. It proved not quite up to the task, and the result was a brain that functioned at a child's level, behind a face that looked like crumpled-up paper. Bizarro (who took his name from hearing the word "bizarre" applied to him) had all of Superboy's wonderful powers, but no real spark of life -- a fact he was just bright enough to understand." --from Don Markstein's Toonopedia

Last week (an eventful week, to be sure), two sentences became juxtaposed in my consciousness. From Newsweek, concerning Bob Woodward's "State of Denial", we have, "The president is folksy and jocular, but incurious to the point of cluelessness." And from the Associated Press, concerning the new detainees bill, "Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is defending President Bush's anti-terrorism tactics in multiple court battles, said Friday that federal judges should not substitute their personal views for the president's judgments in wartime."

So, as the world becomes more and more dangerous, as we come to know with more and more clarity and certainty that the president has never either known what he was doing with regard to Al Queda or the war in Iraq nor cared to find out, we are told that, nevertheless, that trained judges with education and experience, who know the law and the Constitution, and who, indeed, may be widely traveled, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated in their thinking, are to watch their step because Bush is in charge, and what he says goes.

In what world does this make sense? Surely it cannot make sense even in the Bizarro world of Alberto Gonzales, crawling verminous enabler that he is, or in that of David Addington and John Yoo, two of the other promoters of the "unitary executive" (known in my house as "the Articles of Brutality"). In fact, there are two fatal flaws in Gonzales', Yoo's, and Addington's theories, and they are "George W. Bush" and "Dick Cheney". It would be one thing if they were paving the way for a tyrant of unique intelligence and vision to take charge of the new empire, but on the one hand, they have Bush, whose every utterance is a clueless embarrassment, either because it is inarticulate or because it is obtuse, and on the other hand they have a snarling liar whom not even many of those strangely faithful to Bush can abide. But, as Donald Rumsfeld would say, "You attempt to seize power with the president you have rather than the president you wish you had."

There is a reason America doesn't have a king, and it is that the Founders, whatever their faults, realized that in spite of centuries of effort that had gone into making monarchy work, courts and countries were repeatedly stuck with children, madmen, idiots, profligates, fools, and knaves who happened to be firstborn sons of the reigning monarch. I know that the members of the Bush Administration have never seen a conflict of interest that they didn't want to perpetrate, and that it is very tempting, if you are power mad, to assert, "I want total power, so I am going to say I have it, and you are going to let me have my way, even though every day in every way I show that I don't have the intelligence or good judgment to wield the power I want," but do we really want to go there as a nation? I think we should stick with the Founders.

Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and the other neocons are all cut from the same cloth. They want to run the world, but they don't know enough about the world to actually achieve anything other than damage and chaos. Surely this is the failure of the "CEO President" model and a perfect example of crony capitalism at work. The vote on the detainee bill last week shows that Congress remains in thrall to something that the citizens reject. In the abstract, I would like to know what that is, but mostly I would just like to throw the bums out.