Message to George W. Bush

This is what our president said today:

These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that. You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die. Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists.

Nobody likes to see an unchanging, static situation that costs so many lives with so little apparent progress. People are more than willing to turn on their TV each day and see the havoc wrought by terrorists -- provided they don't turn on that same TV a year later and see that nothing has changed. Everyone's more than willing to have their psyches "strained" while doing the "hard work" to support our troops in the pursuit of people who want to re-establish oppressive religious (or Stalinist) dictatorships.

But what causes the most "strain" is the lack of any kind of measurable results with so little apparent change in tactics - sometimes 10 massacred in Baghdad, sometimes 100 - and every indication that the whole Middle East is about to go thermonuclear because of Iran - a situation for which we apparently have no meaningful strategy whatsoever, aside from "send in the Euroweenies" - which is darkly amusing, but ultimately useless as the storm clouds gather and radicals show every sign of gaining strength.

Nobody likes the choice between a brainless, "stay-the-course" single-mindedness and a willfully naive and dangerous appeasement from the other side that amounts to little more than "not Bush" instead of a coherent alternative strategy. But likewise, nobody really gets a kick out of having a leader that can't articulate a policy, one whose speeches would confuse the Word spell-check, a man who doesn't bother to engage his critics on any terms whatsoever. Everybody remembers presidents like Clinton and Reagan, who, regardless of how we felt about them, spoke directly and consistently to the American people in times of crisis – even when they caused the crisis – looking right above the reporters heads into the cameras to the folks at home and never pushing their subordinates out ahead of them.

Everybody knows the difference, and it’s straining our psyche.

Tags: Bush