Bush's sad, destructive genius

Ezra Klein has an excellent (and short) post describing why the Democrats can't get Bush to do anything correctly. First, like the spoiled child he is, Bush will react to anyone trying to tell him how to do something properly be doing exactly the opposite. Under most circumstances a President acting so childishly and destructively will have to give in the political pressures placed on him by wiser people. Not Bush. He has freed himself from all political restraints of the kind that would restrain his worst idiocies.

Here is Exra's summary:

He has united the country against him. But he has found power in division, in lonesomeness, in unpopularity. He realized that a narrow loss in the 2000 election meant he didn't need to govern so as to retain a robust majority. He understood that legislation didn't need as many votes as possible, it merely required as many votes as necessary. And he figured out that a lame duck president who polls in the 20s need never make another compromise -- and so need never kowtow to a disagreeable electorate.

This will be his legacy, as it was, in the end, his genius. While Nixon famously pursued the Southern strategy because he realized that if he broke the country into pieces, his piece would be bigger, Bush broke the country into pieces, and embraced the smaller half, and then a mere quarter. He made the executive branch the minority party, and in doing, freed himself from many of the constraints of democracy. Truly, he has achieved a Machiavellian enlightenment, a state of perfect zen-like detachment from democracy.

So Bush has been able to change the American Republican from one in which the Executive is responsible to the electorate to a temporary Monarchy in which he is free to do whatever idiocy he decides he wants.

Go read the entire article. Ezra really nails the situation quite well.