REMEMBERING THE BUSH BABY

Jerry Harkins


The lesser galago, also called the bush baby (Galago sene-galensis), is one of the smallest members of the order of primates, being about the size of a squirrel with a brain weighing a couple of grams. Despite its size, it is exceptionally vocal, producing loud, shrill cries surprisingly like those of a human baby. The plaintive cries and "cute" appearance may account for the name "bush baby.”

It could be a lot worse and, not so long ago, it was. This essay first appeared in 2005:

I am the bearer of very bad news. Your President is a moron. He didn’t know anything. Nobody told him anything. And he doesn’t remember anything. About anything. Fortunately, God whispers in his ear. Unfortunately, the voice he thinks is God’s actually belongs to Dick Cheney and Mr. Cheney isn’t telling him any different. The White House PR machine goes to great lengths these days to proclaim that the President is smarter than he looks and is a terrific manager who’s right on top of things and makes all the big decisions. He never looks backward. In other words, it’s become embarrassingly obvious he’s a moron. The posturing is necessitated by a series of books by knowledgeable insiders the burden of which is that the President drools a lot and is not completely toilet trained.

• He used to be a businessman who was so bad at business (three bankruptcies) he required serial bailing out by Stalwarts of the Bush family (SOB’s). In spite of his Harvard MBA.

• He used to be a bum who engaged in binge drinking and related intellectual pursuits. He was saved by the love of Jesus and a strong woman.

• He is a born again Christian. He believes the universe was created on October 4, 4004 BC at 9 o’clock in the morning, Texas time. In spite of his Yale BA.

Did I mention that he’s a moron? This is important because it explains why he keeps saying we’re winning a war we have already lost, why he paid no attention to the August 6, 2001 memo regarding terrorist hijacking, and why he can’t pronounce words of more than two syllables. It explains his goofy facial expressions and why he likes to play cowboy down on the range in Texas. It explains a lot. For instance, do you really think anyone with even half a brain would embrace tax cuts as a way to reduce the federal deficit? Why was he the last person to hear about the two most disastrous events of his administration, the attacks of 9/11 and the publication of those prison photos? And even if he was so disconnected, why in God’s name did he use “nobody told me” as a defense, thereby admitting his ignorance? Why else would he tell transparent lies like the one about cutting down all the trees, not to help his fellow plutocrats in the forest products industry, but to prevent forest fires? (Of course, technically he’s right about this: no trees does mean no forest fires among other things.)

Now a lot of you are thinking how can you say such terrible things about such a decent fellow who, as a matter of fact, was twice elected Governor of Texas? By God, you think, the American people almost elected him President of the United States. Wouldn’t that make all those voters morons too? Well, sure. If you insist on measuring the intellect of the voters by the people they routinely elect to govern themselves, then it follows that we’re all morons. You could, of course, point to the occasional exception. The more cynical among you could attribute it to the absence of “none of the above” on most ballots. Finally, if you’re really feeling nasty, you might say that American politicians and voters are no better and no worse than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Actually, however, the only way to assure that we and our leaders are blessed with roughly the same intellectual skills would be to select the latter by random sampling. Otherwise, Harkins’s Laws of Competitive Politics inevitably see to it that, in any political contest, the worst possible candidate always wins. To wit:

• In politics, the sound bite is king. Short sentences endlessly repeated are the coin of the realm. This is a variation of the principle that empty barrels make the most noise.

• Government is the art of unkept promises. A candidate who knows this will always prevail over one who doesn’t. Voters, given a choice between a candidate whose promises are realistic and one who promises them the moon will always choose the latter. Everyone knows neither will keep his or her promises but a little fantasy can serve as a warm blanket.

• In every election, symbols trump substance. This is a corollary of Parkinson’s Law to the effect that the only factor influencing the outcome of a meeting is the seating arrangement.

• Lord Acton was right: power tends to corrupt. Politicians are obsessive about power to the exclusion of all rational thought. It begins with achieving the most important goal in a politician’s career which is getting the right parking space
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• Finally, crime pays. This is axiomatic. While it is true that most career criminals are smarter than most politicians, there is considerable overlap between the two professions.

There are a few advantages to having a moron in charge of things. First, since he can’t learn anything, no one has to tell him anything. He has universal deniability, a huge asset for any politician. Second, it is futile and unsporting to second guess his decisions. Once he acts, it would be churlish to say that heads would have been a better call than tails. Third, the only rational way to hold him accountable is to have the lowest possible expectations which, of course, he is bound to exceed half the time unless his lucky coin is defective. It could be worse and would be if Karl Rove were the de jure President instead of just the de facto one.

There are also serious disadvantages to having a moron running the country—I mean in addition to the horrific notion of having the little black box with the big red button anywhere near him. It is a well established scientific principle that morons cannot resist big red buttons. Beyond that, though, you have no idea who is making the disastrous day-to-day decisions. When the President endorsed Ariel Sharon’s assassination squads and yanked the right of return rug out from under the Palestinians, he undid 50 years of American diplomacy in a single casual sentence which he ad libbed at a Rose Garden Photo Op. The Palestinians, who never had much faith in us anyway, rightly concluded that the President was washing his hands of the peace process. Now maybe you think Mr. Bush was right. Or, maybe you think he was just lucky. He called heads and, sure enough, it came up heads. It doesn’t make much difference what you or I think. What should bother all of us is that he made this huge, earth-shattering, policy-reversing decision pretty much between potty training and coffee break. I don’t want to “misunderestimate” him, but you know he was winging it. Or maybe Paul Wolfowitz put something in that coffee. Do you think he consulted Colin Powell? Do you think he has any idea that the Balfour Declaration is not some gay rights manifesto? When he says tax cuts are good for reducing deficits, is he recycling what even his daddy called “voodoo economics?” No, it’s not that complicated. Some Republican who has his ear told him tax cuts for the wealthy translate directly into campaign contributions. “As a bonus, Mr. President, you will reduce the deficit.” Who told him such a thing? My friend, you do not know. You know it wasn’t a conservative economist like Milton Friedman or a Keynesian like Bob Ruben or even an acolyte of Ayn Rand like Alan Greenspan. All you know is that whoever told him that was (a) filthy rich and (b) a Republican.

Who’s in charge here? There are times I get all teary eyed remembering the good old days when you knew Al Haig really was running things. We have had Presidents who were happy to be thought of as intellectually challenged. Eisenhower, for one, cultivated the image of an average Joe who graduated sixty-first in a West Point Class of 164. But can you imagine George W. Bush playing Ike’s role in World War II? Please! Not even Omar Bradley, who graduated forty-fourth in the same class of 1915, could have done that. And Bradley was a genius.

When Mr. Bush drools, he’s not putting it on. When he looks puzzled, it’s because he is. Jacob Weisberg says he wasn’t born stupid, he chose it. Which is pretty much the same line the White House is trying to sell when it says he’s smarter than he looks. They’re both wrong. A smart person like Eisenhower can choose the appearance of stupidity but cannot actually become stupid (any more than a truly stupid person can become smart). Someone like Jessica Simpson can make a career out of really dumb remarks but you have to be pretty smart to get away with such a gig. George II is no Jessica Simpson. When he wants to say that repealing the estate tax is good for everyone, it comes out, “The death tax is good for people from all walks of life.” This is not a regrettable lack of fluency; it is a tragic lack of intelligence. The words come out meaning the opposite of what he wants to say. He can’t even lie logically. When he proclaims his Iraq policy has been a “catastrophic success,” it is not a Malapropism, it is a short circuit in what passes for his brain. When he claims, “We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end” it’s not a slip of the tongue. It is a profound ignorance of cause and effect logic. When he claims, “Our economy is on a rising path,” he means it as an optimistic metaphor. He has never heard of Sisyphus (he cut that class at Yale) and he never stopped to think about the difficulties of a rising path. When he blames the trial lawyers for the fact that, "Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country," he’s not ad libbing an inanity. He probably has no idea what an OB-GYN does for a living but he knows loving women is widely practiced among Texas cowboys. Finally, when he says, “It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret the law,” it is not a simple mistake. It is a dangerous combination of Mr. Bush’s stupidity and Mr. Rove’s megalomania. God save us!

Subsequently

 God did not save us.  Instead he chose to punish me for thinking he could not do worse than George W. Bush.  It was by way of reminding me that God is omnipotent.  He can do anything, even invent a President like Donald Trump.  Didn't even break a sweat.

Much Later Than Subsequently

Back in the days when I wrote political satire, I didn't pay much attention to such offenses as name-calling.  George W. Bush is not and never was a moron.  He was frequently inarticulate and he made a lot of decisions I didn't approve of.  He surrounded himself with too many jackasses but a woman like Laura would not have stuck by a moron and a moron would not have been able to do such a good job raising children.  Finally, a moron could never have turned himself into a serious and talented artist in retirement, an artist whose portraits convey a forceful emotional intelligence.  I only regret that I never had a chance to have a beer with hm.