A different kind of Bush critic
Dick Meyer at the CBS News website shows what a non-deranged, non-hyperbolc critique of the Bush adminsration might look like. Meyer rejects the view that Bush is a religious nut who governs by faith-based instinct without regard for reality (note that this thesis disregards, among many other things, the fact that the most central and defining views Bush now holds are ones he developed while in office based on new facts). Meyer also rejects the view that the Bush administration has become drunk on power.
Meyer instead attributes the defects he perceives in the administration to a general decline in the way that large organizations function in our society. He finds that, like Bill Clinton, Bush runs his administration like a permanent campaign. Moreover, "in campaigns, the standards of truthfulness and honesty are very low. They resemble the standards we've stooped to in corporate life, just as the techniques of campaigns imitate corporate ones."
I don't find Meyer's critique very persuasive. For one thing, it ignores the extent to which this president does make decisions based on conviction. The bold and controversial measures he has proposed in areas like immigration and social security and, indeed, foreign policy are not those of a man who governs in campaign mode. And Bush's conscious effort to shut down his campaign-style machinery in much of 2005, and take a pummeling from the MSM essentially without responding, was a huge mistake.
Nonetheless, if an administration were as flawed as Meyer and other critics contend Bush's is, its defects would more likely be the product of broad societal trends than demonic qualities of the president.
