President Pan

[Bush's Belligerent Assholery in using the occasion of Congress leaving for spring recess to make three recess appointments, ergo bypassing the Senate confirmation process, reminded me of a post I wrote over two years ago about one of my least favorite of Dubya's many, many unappealing qualities -- his immaturity. Sadly, the post continues to be just as relevant today, if not more so, given that a Democratically-controlled Congress has brought to an abrupt and screeching halt the granting of Dubya's ever desire, and the denial of his wishes has exposed yet further depths to his childish petulance. So here it is again: President Pan.]

In responding to a Washington Post article examining what Bush’s legacy might be, Kevin Drum wrote:

I continue to dither about what exactly it is that motivates George Bush, but there's at least one thing that's always seemed clear to me: he is the most unfailingly partisan president we've had in a long time. It's genuinely hard to figure out a political philosophy that ties together tax cuts, Medicare expansion, war in Iraq, immigration reform, Mars missions, Social Security privatization, and vastly increased domestic spending, but even if ideological coherency sometimes takes a backseat in Bush's world, partisan advantage is always front and center.

I’ve thought about this a lot, too, wondering what is, exactly, the method behind his madness. Whole books have been written on the subject, and I cannot begin to fathom the number of words across the blogosphere dedicated to the pursuit of discerning the enigmatic motivations of this president are. Dry drunk, child of privilege, slave to overwhelming Oedipus complex, puppet, idiot…legions of hypotheses have been proposed, and yet instead of one having more veracity than another, I think they are all part and parcel of one pathetically simple overarching character attribute, so entrenched as to have become immutable. The man is pathologically immature.