Friday, December 28, 2007

Character counts


In the Huffington Post, Bob Cesca ranks the most inappropriate Bush smirks/giggles of 2007.

I feel like I was onto George W. Bush much, much sooner than most people. For years I just felt like I must be living in a different reality, because every time I picked up a newspaper or turned on the television I kept hearing about George Bush's great moral character and courage and decency, and it just seemed so obviously false.

He smirked like this all through the 2000 campaign; from the start, he always seemed to me to be enjoying himself most of all when he was saying things like "they're gonna be put to death." And a satisfied, sadistic smirk would cross his face. This is when he wasn't openly mocking people he'd had executed.

Basically, Bush just always seemed like a sociopath to me. In grinning and chuckling when he talks about the war he lied us into that's killed hundreds of thousands of people, he has given me no reason to think otherwise.

This deeply awful person cannot leave office fast enough.

Not that this will make a shred of difference, but I'd like to ask the media to please stop diagnosing "good" and "bad" character in our candidates for national office. Yes, character does matter. Of course it does. But the thing is, you're absolutely, unbelievably bad at evaluating it in real time, Media. You thought George W. Bush, who would go on to be the worst president we've ever had, was the candidate of strong moral character. You told us over and over he was honest and decent, and Al Gore, future holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, was a lying, overly ambitious cad.

Clearly you have no meaningful insight into "character." So this time, please just give us the facts and let us decide for ourselves.


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