Somewhere in there, there's a sensible meme (Bush will have to trust expertise, or make uninformed decisions) and a silly meme (Bush is really a moron, right?), and while I think tb leans towards the former, sometimes a bit of the latter creeps in.
hey, it's not just me:
Frum's memoir, "The Right Man," is generally very admiring of Bush -- "a good man who is not a weak man," he writes, and a man of "decency, honesty, rectitude, courage and tenacity." But Frum confides: "He has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result ill informed; more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be."
washingtonpost.com
Foreign policy, like other policy areas, is a mixture of the very simple (basic direction, objectives, priorities, etc.) and the very complex (the translation of those into actual decisions on a vast range of smaller, more practical questions). Very few nonprofessionals appreciate the difficulties involved in moving from one to the other. (Which is a central reason why all the blather from most pundits is worthless.) Bush himself demonstrably did not, at first--which is why we've often seen de facto policy shifts when rhetoric collides with reality (cf. the unfolding Korean saga).
Lindy feels that we have another Truman on our hands. That may indeed be how the story is eventually told; I'm just not sure yet.
tb@juryout.com |
