Decadent Perversity

Via Brad DeLong, Sidney Blumenthal has an answer of sorts for the question I tried to address a couple of posts ago: Does Bush understand that he is one of the "evil ones?"

Briefly put, I think Blumenthal's answer is no, not really. Reading Robert Draper's Bush Biography, Dead Certain, Blumenthal arrives at an analysis that I found both convincing and frightening. There is a lot there to reinforce an old stereotype: Bush the bully, and another I was less aware of - Bush the cultivator of servile flattery.

Bush is a classic insecure authoritarian who imposes humiliating tests of obedience on others in order to prove his superiority and their inferiority. In 1999, according to Draper, at a meeting of economic experts at the Texas governor's mansion, Bush interrupted Rove when he joined in the discussion, saying, "Karl, hang up my jacket."
. . .
When Colin Powell was several minutes late to a Cabinet meeting, Bush ordered that the door to the Cabinet Room be locked.
. . .
At a political strategy meeting in May 2004, when Matthew Dowd and Rove explained to him that he was not likely to win in a Reagan-like landslide, as Bush had imagined, he lashed out at Rove: "KARL!"
. . .
Those around him have learned how to manipulate him through the art of flattery. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld played Bush like a Stradivarius, exploiting his grandiosity.
. . .
Every morning, Josh Bolten, the chief of staff, greets Bush with the same words: "Thank you for the privilege of serving today."

There is more of course. Blumenthal draws a picture of a President clinging to his delusions as they spiral ever further from reality.

Bush grasps at the straws of his own disinformation as he casts himself deeper into the abyss. The more profound and compounded his blunders, and the more he redoubles his certainty in ultimate victory, the greater his indifference to failure. He has entered a phase of decadent perversity, where he accelerates his errors to vindicate his folly. As the sands of time run down, he has decided that no matter what he does, history will finally judge him as heroic.

The greater the chaos, the more he reinforces and rigidifies his views. The more havoc he wreaks, the more he insists he is succeeding. His intensified struggle for self-control is matched by his increased denial of responsibility. Hence Petraeus.
. . .
Bush's ever-inflating self-confidence hides his gaping fear of failure. His obsession with deference demands exercises of humiliation that never satisfy him. His unwavering resolve is maintained by his adamant refusal to wade into the waters of ambiguity. "You can't talk me out of thinking freedom's a good thing!" he protests to his biographer. For Bush, even when he is long out of office, presiding at his planned library's Freedom Institute -- "I would like to build a Hoover Institute" -- victory will always be just around the corner.

More Cornelius Fudge than Lord Voldemort. The supreme hazard is that in his recklessness and desperation, he will attack Iran. I wonder if a bi-partisan delegation from Congress promising impeachment if he did would help?