More Reaction to Bush's Strange 9/11 Speech

Forget for a moment that Bush's 9/11 speech was designed to reframe Bush's many failures and offer instead a partisan club for bashing Democrats one last time. It was a strange and desperate speech by a man who knows his presidency is failing.

Here's a couple of excerpts from a post by Digby of Hullabaloo talking about Bush trying to tie his wagon to the Greatest Generation while half-believing his own hype when he arrived in Washington:

Yes, the press veritably quivered with excitement that the "grown-ups" were back in charge. The aburdity of it all was staggering, of course --- the boomer man-child who never had a real job and drank himself into oblivion until he was 40 representing the Greatest Generation --- but there it was. When 9/11 hit shortly after he took office it was a seamless transition. (They even put him in a flightsuit and tried to pass him off as a heroic WWII pilot.) This yearning for "grown-ups" to take charge is a conservative boomer psychological condition. They and the political class are the only ones who are still fixated on the 1960's; the rest of us moved on sometime back.

One big problem for the Republicans is that a majority in this country now are too young to give a damn about any of this. Rove might be able to tap in to the yearning of middle aged rightwingers to be involved in an epic struggle that competes with their parents' greater accomplishments, but the young conservatives who are required to sustain this endless war don't have the same psychic needs. They didn't grow up in the shadow of a generation who fought and won two existential battles; their boomer parents either failed to rise to the occasion (in opposition or battle) when they had the chance or rejected the whole war fetish all together. These young conservatives'idea of glory is winning a fast paced video game. If 9/11 had even had a modicum of the same sense of threat as Pearl Harbor, we would have seen a similar rush on the recruiting centers and we didn't.

(snip)

This rhetoric of epic struggle that rivals WWII and The Cold War serves the simple political purpose of rallying the conservative base so that the Republicans can maintain power. It is guided by the deep psychological need for conservative baby boomers to find some meaning in their pathetic lives and a cynical attempt to co-opt some sunny, simple vision of the Greatest Generation --- who would be the last people to claim the depression and the wars of their lifetimes were either sunny or simple. The younger conservative generation sees it as a cynical political game, which it is.

The entire campaign is built on a Disneyfied version of WWII and boomer childhood nightmare cartoons of The Cold War. They trying to squeeze all the boogeymen of the 20th century into Osama bin Laden's turban in the hope that they can cop a little bit of that Hollywood heroism themselves. (After all, their hero Ronald Reagan didn't actually fight in any real war either --- he just remembered the movies he was in and thought he had.) It is deeply, deeply unserious.

But profitable. The longer right wing Republican politicians and their friends stay in power, the more they will enrich themselves because, after all, they're better than the rest of us and deserve compensation for not earning their first million by age twenty-five.

But Digby touches on something important that has been noticed by others. The 60s were a long time ago and two generations have passed since then and most of the world has moved on. But not the conservative Baby Boomers who are now in power. There is a significant part of conservatives who, like the stereotypes of yesterday's young generation of the 60s, live for today, getting what profits they can, legal or otherwise, because, if truth be told, they don't really believe in America's future. Just their own. The harder they wave the American flag while putting their assets in offshore bank accounts, sending jobs overseas, and driving up the national debt for generations of Americans to come, the more you know what they really believe. The Republicans who control Washington these days are bereft of ideas, and they are morally and philosophically bankrupt.