Michael Kinsley: "The Thinker"

According to me, this op-ed is worth reading.

I think that the leftier parts of the left radically over-play the society done it card...but I also think that the right tends to dramatically under-estimate the effects of social forces. Kinsley is right to call W on his inconsistency about the nature and causes of terrorism. He (Kinsley) suggests that this may represent an evolution in the president's thinking--though it isn't clear how serious he is about that hypothesis. My first inclination is to think that this is just standard Dubyan post hoc rationalization...but I hold out a tiny bit of hope that it's something more.

Seriously. While I'm on this topic, I'll say something that I haven't said for awhile: I sometimes wonder whether W might be a more decent fellow if he were surrounded by more decent fellows...or if he'd had a better upbringing.

As we all know, W strikes many folks as a plain-talkin' straight-shootin', good ol' regular guy--and they desperately want a guy like that for president. Some of W's liberal detractors don't believe he's that kind of guy; others believe he is--but don't want one as president. I count myself among the former. I really have no time for liberals (or conservatives) who think that one can't be intelligent and inarticulate, or plain-spoken and knowledgeable. I can't really believe that that many liberals think such things, but that's what many criticisms of Bush seem to entail.

Me, I am about 65% sure that W is not a good guy. Having spent a good bit of my life around regular folks, and another decent chunk around spoiled frat brats, I have to say that W seems much more like the latter than the former to me. But I don't think it's completely his fault.

Since he didn't have to turn out like he did, I do blame him for his character to some extent. Though...well, to a large extent I blame society. And his parents. First, they were rich as Croessus. This is a bad start. The only thing more likely to make you a worthless human being than soul-crushing poverty is vast wealth. So I think we've got to cut W at least a little slack on these grounds. Of course many people are rich and decent, however, so the Bush's wealth only excuses so much. Going to an Ivy league school is o.k. if you're going because you love ideas...if not, however...well...you might still turn out o.k. if you don't join a fraternity...but we know how that turned out in W's case...

At any rate, some of the blame also must go to those rich Friends of Poppy and Aspiring Friends of Poppy who bailed W out every time he failed in business. Failure is hard to live with, and one can be excused--to some extent--for allowing oneself to spin failure as success under such conditions. The almost inevitable result, however, will be an overestimation of one's own abilities.

But society is really to blame for electing this fellow--a guy who might have been, say, a perfectly good functionary for, say, a major-league baseball team--president of the United States. He's patently unqualified, unfit for office, and he has not the slightest idea what he's doing.

But if a state elects an unqualified person to its highest office, who's to blame? The poor sap who finds himself in over his head, or the benighted multitudes who put him there?

But, still, W might have turned out to be a good enough guy if he hadn't fallen in with Cheney and that lot. Had he had a group of decent small-'d'-democrats around him during the 2000 election debacle, a group that would have pointed out to him that he had lost, and that--obviously--attempts to prevent votes from being counted were anti-democratic and antithetical to the principles the president must defend...well, I can't help but wonder whether he might not have seen the light of reason.

Maybe I'm being too easy on the guy here, but, unlike some of my acquaintances, I don't think he's practically evil incarnate.

To some extent, he may just be an ordinary guy who lead an overly hard--by which I mean charmed--life.