For here is Dubya, mumbling his way through another shockingly insulting news conference just recently, screwing up both his face and his intelligence data (again) and still a-huntin’ for nonexistent WMDs in Iraqi turkey farms (?) as reporter after reporter asks him, point blank, why he won’t simply come clean.
They ask him, repeatedly, why he cannot find a single mistake in any policy his slithery admin has unleashed upon the nation, much less confess to any rampant missteps and botched decisions and oily ulterior motives and blatant screw-ups regarding 9/11 and Saddam and WMDs and his fetish for warmongering and for rewriting intelligence data to suit his corporate needs, all while taking more vacations than any president in history.
His answer? Nope. Nossiree, no mistakes were made. In fact, we as a nation are more on track than ever and hey lookit my shiny new boots okey doke thanks fer comin’ gotta run. Plants wilted, children cried, even semicomatose cats couldn’t help but wince at Bush’s weird deflections and alcoholism-grade denials. What a surreal and sad country we swim in.
Why won’t Bush admit he got 9/11 at least partially wrong? Why won’t he acknowledge, at the very least — as even longtime egomaniacal terrorism wonk Richard Clarke had the calm cojones to do — that the U.S. ain’t perfect and the government could’ve done much (much, much) better and hey we’re flawed and we’re learning and sorry, everyone, for the bloodbath and the malevolence and the rampant ongoing death and the 100 dead U.S. soldiers in the past month alone?
Maybe it’s faux-macho Texas pride. Maybe it’s dumb-guy humiliation, that feeling that if Bush admits to just one of his policy defects, it’s a slippery slope toward admitting he hasn’t had much of a clue as to what’s going on in his administration since pronouncing our country’s name as “‘Murka” in his swearing-in ceremony.
Or maybe it’s all about God. Maybe it’s because Dubya still genuinely believes he’s divinely inspired, that he’s truly doing the Lord’s work by sanctimoniously blowing the living crap out of ragtag nations and allowing American GIs to die for his administration’s hollow and increasingly indefensible political stratagems, and to admit personal error is to admit error in his overall pseudo-religious worldview.
This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you might’ve made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well, that sort of humility doesn’t sit well with the hawks and the corporate profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead soldiers in Iraq.
And there is, tragically, only more numb, shell-shocked citizens and weeping families of the dead, all begging for someone, somewhere, to offer up just a single note of apology, of contrition, of hope and common recognition of the sad tragicomic circus in which we all perform.
This is all anyone is really asking for from our leaders, finally. Just a glimmer of our shared messiness, a common understanding of our collective awe, a single hint of that most tragically rare of current commodities: humanity.