Here's Fred Kaplan again (he's been busy), this time discussing the presidential press conference that we talked about here yesterday. Anyone who's wondering why some people don't think highly of George W. Bush — or thinks the concerns about his mental powers are just about verbal gaffes — oughta read this piece. And it isn't even that Bush is wrong about a lot of stuff. It's that he's wrong about a lot of stuff and stubbornly insistent that if he never admits it, that will somehow make him right.
The other day on Scarborough Country on MSNBC, all a Bush defender could offer was to say something like, "I trust Bush's gut." In other words, he may not know what he's doing but he has good instincts. I'm sorry…even if that were true, you don't risk the lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of human beings, on someone's "gut." The next time a G.O.P. strategist says something like that, I'd like to see his questioner drag out the old (but not inappropriate) surgeon comparison…
You know: You're going in for open heart surgery. Your surgeon walks in and he stumbles over his words the way Bush does all the time, erring as to where your thyroid is located, just as Bush keeps saying certain countries are adjacent to Syria when they aren't. More than half the people around think he doesn't know what he's doing, and even some who still like him admit to some gruesome mistakes. There are others with different suggestions on how your surgery should go…which other organ, for instance, he really should be removing. Still, he's determined to do it his way and he lectures you about courage and not changing one's mind just because some of the evidence seems to suggest he's making the situation worse.
Do you trust his gut and let him do it his way? Or do you ask for another surgeon?