Monday 22 March 2004

Pic of the day: The Hulk for President! (Actually this is a Forest Giant. Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.)

"Anyone but Bush"

I see this increasingly on friendly Internet sites. People have small posters with humorous content, basically saying "Anyone except Bush for President". While I understand the sentiment, I think it is a bit over the top.

W. Bush is a man of barely average intelligence, judging from his school grades and his displayed knowledge of various topics. But he's not a retard ... any average person would be exposed as ignorant if he was in the spotlight day after day.

Bush clearly holds religious convictions that are common among Americans, but certainly not necessary to be a good American and absolutely not enshrined in the Constitution. It seems to me that he sometimes has a problem drawing the line between his religion and his nationality. But it could have been a lot worse. For instance he went out publicly after the Islamic fundamentalists attacked the USA with planes, and tried to explain to the people that this was not the true face of Islam. Whether he actually knew this beforehand or was wise enough to let someone else write his scripts, I do not know. Anyway it was a good thing and sorely needed at the time. Not that anything less would have been acceptable, but still. He's not an all out flaming religious bigot. You've seen them worse.

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The problem as I see it is the unwritten rule that a sitting President in his first term shall be the party's candidate unless impeached. The Republican party is bound to have better guys than this. A harmless guy whose main qualification was not fornicating at work may have seemed like a good idea at the peacefullest of peaceful times when things were just going up, up and away. But in dire times such as these, the world's mightiest nation (for a while yet) needs someone with more IQ and a broader view than your friendly neighborhood mailman. I refuse to believe the Republican party has less of them than the opposition. After all, the Democratic Party is the haven of the losers, and as such should have more of their role models than the Republicans, which tends to recruit from the already successful. But you sure cannot see this today.

The Republican Party has been staunch defenders of free trade for generations now. Yet Bush Jr managed to slap a poorly justified steel tariff on imports from friendly countries at a time when the country needed all the goodwill it could get. As I've said before, I believe the reason they largely got away with it was that most European and Asian countries realized that Bush did not know what he was doing, as he has demonstrated all too often. It is not particularly Republican to utterly destroy the nation's finances by spending far more than you tax. Yes, Reagan did it too, but he was also the kind of guy who people thought was harmless until he got in power. After all, a cowboy film hero? Obviously he was meant to be a figurehead. But "time and chance happen to them all" as is written in Ecclesiastes. (The same book, a little known part of the Bible, also claims that "Fools are put in many high positions" but I think that was meant to be descriptive, not normative.)

So in conclusion, I think America and the world would be better off with a more qualified Republican. But, for the love of goodness, don't shoot Bush! That means Cheney takes over completely, and then may God have mercy on us all.