Capitol Hill Blue, the Washington DC publication that cultivates relationships with White House staffers, reports (September 28) one White House aide saying: "It’s like working in an insane asylum. People walk around like they’re in a trance. We're the dance band on the Titanic, playing out our last songs to people who know the ship is sinking and none of us are going to make it."
"If POTUS is on the road, you can breathe a little easier," says an aide. Otherwise it is one temper tantrum after another from Bush, whose "cakewalk war" has turned into interminable conflict, whose idiocy in diverting funding for New Orleans' levees to war in Iraq was disastrous for the famous city, and whose Social Security privatization has been rejected by the electorate.
Even rah-rah Republican Newt Gingrich says the White House is surrounded by failure.
No member of the White House staff wants to deliver news to Bush, because the news is bad. Bush demands sycophancy and equates bad news with disagreement and disloyalty.
Little wonder that Republican minority token Condi Rice was dispatched to Princeton last week to inform the university that democracy comes out of the barrel of a gun. US military force, said the secretary of state with a straight face, is required to force democracy down the throats of the Muslims in order to save future American generations from "insecurity and fear."
The Bush administration is the administration of deceit and hypocrisy. It is the antithesis of democracy. All democracy rests on persuasion, which implies disagreement. Yet, Bush and Condi regard dissent as disloyalty. They glorify coercion.
