As life has intervened on my normally sunny existence these days -- not to mention my ability to think clearly or concentrate -- I'll try to keep this one short. (As short as is ever possible for me, that is.) In the wake of this weekend's White House Correspondents' Dinner, hosted by the inimitable Stephen Colbert (which if you haven't seen his speech yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Pretty funny stuff that can be seen here at Ifilm.com -- parts one, two and three), we'll begin with the latest exploits of my favorite target, that of the Great Decider.

After just receiving his lowest poll numbers yet -- even lower than the ones mentioned here a few weeks ago -- the President embarked on a brief speaking tour to remind us why his numbers are so low -- his unflinching refusal to admit wrong or reality and his continued insistence to speak to the nation like we're a bunch of unintelligent, idiotic fourth-graders. Consider the following two examples. First, the President showed up to speak to the Renewable Fuels Association, a group of scientists, businessmen, and executives in the ethanol industry, to discuss his energy policy (the mesquite-powered cars Stephen mentioned?) and then proceeded to explain to them how hybrid cars work and where gasoline comes from, to name only two of most flagrantly stupid examples.

For the former, there's this -- "The easiest way to promote fuel efficiency is to encourage drivers to purchase highly efficient hybrid or clean diesel vehicles, which, by the way, can run on alternative energy sources. Hybrid vehicles run on a combination of a traditional engine and an electric battery. The twin sources of power allow hybrid cars and trucks to travel about twice as far on a gallon of fuel as gasoline-only vehicles. When people are driving hybrids, they're conserving energy." 

And for the latter, this -- "The truth of the matter is, the long-term strategy is to power our automobiles with something other than oil  -- something other than gasoline, which is derived from oil."

This is a speech given to the RENEWABLE FUELS ASSOCIATION. Does he honestly believe that they don't understand the intricacies of hybrid technologies or the origins of gasoline? It's their life's work! By explaining this to them, does he think that will solve the energy crisis? "OH! Gasoline comes from OIL, not the tears of fairies and leprechauns! NOW I know how to free us from the shackles of our crippling petroleum dependence..."

But that insult to our collective intelligence wasn't his only offering that week, but merely his opening salvo. That's because the next day, when announcing his newest press secretary, the Administration's talking head version 3.0, Tony Snow, to the press corps, the President proceeded to explain how that job functioned, too.

"My job is to make decisions," he said. (Uh-oh, again with the "I'm the decider" stuff.) "And his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people."

This, while speaking to the press corps, the same people who have spent virtually every day of the last five and a half years with either Ari Fleischer of Scott McClellan, THE PREVIOUS TWO PRESS SECRETARIES! "Thank you, Mr. President, I think we've got it."

I'm sorry if this seems pedantic and trivial to some of you (that last paragraph sounds like a Lewis Black-ian rant in my head, my face all scrambled and arms a-flailing), but comments like this -- completely oblivious or disregarding of the audience and its members' intellects -- are insulting and incredibly counterproductive. If you want to engage an audience and maintain their interest, you talk to them, not at them, and especially not down to them. If you don't, you immediately lose them as they rightfully tune you out.

The American public, despite what comedians and cynics may say, are not a bunch of lobotomized troglodytes whose brains are only good for keeping the insides of their skulls warm. They can relate to an issue and debate it on its merits, if only given the chance. Unfortunately, this President -- and many other politicians, too -- seem to think otherwise and feel the need to speak in offerings that would even seem out of place at the back of an elementary school's short bus. Perhaps some of that's to blame for Congressional and Presidential approval ratings in the low thirties. But what do I know? I'm just one of the troglodytes.

Something else that undoubtedly factors into those dismal numbers are the President's actual policies -- the continuing debacle in Iraq, for example, and his aforementioned refusal to honestly discuss the issue. In Frank Rich's column in the Sunday Times, he adroitly lays out several of the ongoing flaws there that leave such a bleak offering of hope for the President's next (and final) thousand days in office. Consider the following:

"The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free."

But Rich isn't so foolish as to believe that's going to happen anytime soon. That's because, as he goes on to explain, despite three years and enormous amounts of money, life, and effort, the situation on the ground in Iraq is scarcely better today than it was before we got started. Rich writes,

"Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most 20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves. The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a $592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80 football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the American bunker."

And while this is undoubtedly a disgraceful reality for the people who placed such hopes with us coming in and doing something -- anything -- right by them in our "preemptive-but-necessary" toppling of their government, Rich doesn't side with the growing number of dissenters calling for Rumsfeld's resignation of late. That's because the true fault, he feels, lies squarely at the top of the food chain and not, solely, with the DC Donald. He writes in his closing,

"Set against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on (and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and haste during the run-up.

"A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy. Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at home to do it for him."

Let's take a guess on which outcome he thinks is most likely. Interesting stuff.

Which leads us to one of the more interesting pieces from the last few weeks, this account from the latest Rolling Stone, which poses the question of whether George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. Relying on "an informal survey of 415 historians" in early 2004 and "conducted by the non-partisan History News Network," this piece -- written by well-respected historian Sean Wilentz (Dayton-Stockton Professor of History and the director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University) -- explains just how poorly the President is viewed from a historical perspective.

Consider the statistics:

*** 81% of those surveyed considered the President's term in office a "failure"
*** 12% called him the worst president in history, almost as many as termed him a success
*** 10% of those who called him a "success" were doing so jokingly, rating him "only the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant"

And as bad as this is, Wilentz points out that "these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure [that of the people rating him the worst in history] would certainly be higher."

That said, he goes on to explain how singularly bad our President is:

"A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment."

Wilentz attributes this to the President's poor performance in the key areas he and his colleagues examined while discussing the issue -- poor foreign and domestic policies, military setbacks, presidential misconduct, and deteriorations in public trust or credibility. What sets our current leader apart historically, though, is not just his exemplary ineptitude in one of these areas, but in all of them. He writes,

"Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance."

It didn't have to be like this, though. For as Wilentz explains, the president had "two enormous opportunities" to fulfill his claims to be "a uniter, not a divider" and save his presidency from the depths of history's cellar -- "in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory."

Wilentz continues,

"On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness...

"Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces."  

Referring to the President's actions after 9/11, Wilentz concludes,

"Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership. No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, 'There is a higher Father that I appeal to.'"

This narrow-minded vision and inability/refusal to incorporate anyone outside the innermost sanctum has led to the aforementioned rankings and poll numbers and to a messianic complex where the President believes he can act with near impunity. (On this, Wilentz's discussion is also quite interesting. Referring to those who argue that our war on terror is somewhat akin to Lincoln's situation during the Civil War with its need for the President to act however he deems fit to safeguard the fate of the nation, he writes,

"Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry."  Very interesting stuff.)

It's time to demand some accountability from the leaders we elect into office and now, with the mid-term elections right around the corner, is the perfect time to start. Demand honesty, openness, and adaptability from the people you vote for, and don't accept that just because this is how things are (and have been, historically, in Washington, though rarely to this degree) that it is how they should or must be. 

It's time to stand up and scream, like Howard Beale from that old movie Network wanted -- "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

We'll close with a couple of readers. First, this one from this month's issue of Atlantic Monthly, a profile on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. It's an interesting look at the man that has inspired such fear in Washington and such admiration in the southern hemisphere, though not an unhealthy amount of the inverse exists as well. Next is this piece from last month's Harper's, a phenomenal look at life on the ground in Congo, which is every bit as horrific and chaotic as you'd expect, if you were one of the five people in the country who'd heard of the ongoing conflict there. ("You mean Sudan isn't the only genocidal conflict we're ignoring in Africa? Jeepers!") Fascinating stuff -- highly recommended.

Finally, we'll close with another piece from Rolling Stone, this one on the debacle that is our federal rebuilding effort post-Katrina. ("Iraq? The Gulf? Are these guys doing anything right? They couldn't rebuild a sandcastle! Jesus!") Written by Matt Taibbi, it's a follow-up piece to his great earlier stuff when he was down there aiding in the rescue efforts and the chaos after the storm. This time he's detailing, despite glad-handing press coverage and ebullient White House reports, how little has actually been done -- "recent revelations by the General Accounting Office [show] that millions upon millions of dollars handed out in no-bid federal contracts had vanished down a budgetary rabbit hole of dubious reconstruction projects and inflated "aid" efforts" -- and how cumbersome and utterly ridiculous the federal requirements are to get money for reconstruction.

Here's a taste:

"The Katrina reconstruction effort has been one of the all-time masterpieces of bloodless institutional racism, a resounding tribute to America's unparalleled ability to fuck the poor under pressure...

"The scam in East Biloxi centers around flood maps, and it mirrors what is likely to be a similar fiasco in New Orleans. New guidelines called Advisory Base Flood Elevations, or ABFEs, issued quietly and unilaterally by FEMA late last year, place the average suggested elevation above sea level for house construction in most of peninsular East Biloxi at eighteen feet. In order to qualify for any federal assistance in rebuilding your home, you must rebuild according to these guidelines. Currently, most houses in the neighborhood are at about nine feet or less. Stallworth says the ABFE regulations add an average of $30,000 in new costs to those returnees who want to rebuild their homes -- homes that are mostly worth no more than $110,000.

"And that's not all. According to Stallworth, regulations for handicapped-access ramps require ten inches of run for every inch of rise. 'So what that means,' he says, 'is that if you have to raise your house up twelve feet, you need a 120-foot ramp. You're starting your ramp three houses down.'"

And if you think that's bad, wait until you get to his explanation of what has to be done to qualify for any reconstruction money. (A couple of paragraphs after the above, starting with "Compounding the ABFE dilemma...") Unbelievable.

Well, that's all I've got for now. So much for short. Apparently I'm as good at living up to expectations here as I am in my other relationships. Such a winner. Until next time, my friends...