Another, farther-flung correspondent who goes by the code-name Black George textseses us last night
U may not agree with the tough decisions, but i hope u'll agree that i was willing to make the tough decisions.It truly is the Samuel Beckett Presidency. I was all highed up at the time and didn't quite get it. Actual text:
You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made. But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.It really is an extraordinary notion, isn't it? That the act of deciding exists independently of the decision itself, that the outcome is an invalid rubric for judging the appropriateness and rightness of the initiatory act.
19 comments:
Sometimes there's a man
Hey, dude ain't called The Decider for nuthin'.
You may not agree with my decision to eat your baby, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to decide to eat your baby.
That the act of deciding exists independently of the decision itself, that the outcome is an invalid rubric for judging the appropriateness and rightness of the initiatory act.
Right, and this has been true for quite a while:
--"At least you know where you stand with Bush (Junior)"
--"He's a person of faith, and that's important."
--"He makes a decision and sticks with it!" (Bush, Senior said something to that effect just the other day.)
--and what have you
Russert, Broder, Maureen Dowd, et al have a lot to answer for after they worked so hard to help make this Bush Presidency a reality.
I didn't know deciding was hard. I decide all the time. Like the time I decided that GW was a total fucking moron. It came to me pretty easy.
Actually, the Dingo ate your baby.
How can I say I'm not responsible...
What does it have to do with me?...
A couple of years ago in corporate America, one of my coworkers pointed out a paragraph in the evaluation criteria for managers. To paraphrase, it stated that "Effective managers are decisive and make decisions that have business impact"
Bernie Madoff would have excelled here!
Ioz, you give him too much credit. After all, not making a decision is a decision, too. He has not defined an independent act; he has said something entirely meaningless
The price is very high, but we think the price is worth it.
Solemn pronouncements like these are certainly rich sources of snark -- especially considering the source -- but it's almost funnier when you think about what he really means by it.
The Bushes and others who tout decisiveness as a substitute for actual, y'know, success -- didn't Richard Perle say something along those lines recently? Alan Greenspan, in one of his interminable memoirs? -- they come from the Authoritarian side of the political aisle, where blind obedience to the Strict-Father authority is, in and of itself, one of the highest virtues. Even if the President is wrong, we have to present a unified front to our enemies.
(Unless, of course, the President gets a blow job, or something like that)
To misquote an old Joshua Holland comment, these people believe that when the President decides to start a war, and the American people all stand behind him, not only will Charles Krauthammer think we wield the Mighty Sword of Infinite Justice and are by definition justified in all of our actions... --but so too will the people upon whom we drop the bombs. Because of all that Decisiveness.
Bush is saying that the way he allegedly "kept us safe" for the last seven-and-a-half years, was actually his reputation for making decisions based on his gut rather than his brain.
That's what strikes me as ludicrous.
From a certain point of view, the more outlandish and outrageous the decision, the better. The more that Bush flouts laws and decency and world public opinion, the more chance he has [/had] to prove that he's a "Disciplined, Innovative" leader with the "Strength of Will" needed to defeat our enemies. Another variation of the Tinkerbell Theory. They also think economic problems work the same way. If only people would just grow a pair and buy a crappy American car when the President says to, instead of an actual well-built Japanese one, then that looming Recession will tuck its tail between its legs and go hide in a corner.
I'm quite confident the Democrats will pilot the country into disaster, but on the other hand I'm not at all sorry to see the White House door hit these morons in the ass on the way out.
Dear Mr. Ioz,
While I don't for one second believe that either W or his advisors read anything as interestingly ponderous as Carl Schmitt, W's addled musings do happen to correspond precisely with the theory Schmitt articulated in his 1922 Political Theology, namely that the sovereign decision in politics is the analogy of the miracle in theology.
Here's Simon Critchley's shot at it:
Simon Critchley, “Crypto-Schmittianism”
http://www.stateofnature.org/crypto-schmit.html
Well, there ya go. I'm such a chatterbox that I pick apart political arguments before they're even posted.
As others have alluded, it's decisiveness in the corporate world, not the value of the decided course, that propels execs up the ladder. As a mentor once told me, they're promoted because they make decisions, not vice versa, and not because they chose the best course. I wasn't sure at the time if that meant that the Board pays execs to be scapegoats (perhaps obvious in Bush's case). Now I think it's a percentage scam. IOW, the decisions aren't based on more knowledge, skill or insight than any other, they just create a perception of positive momentum in a good business climate. It's only when the business fails that the decisions are looked at critically, and someone in middle management can be blamed and fired. Only rarely do the real players take heat, even for their worst decisions, be it buying into Madoff, CDSs, or Abu Ghraib. To Rumsfeld and Bush, the crux of the Abu Ghraib problem was never torture, but the existence of digital photography. To Madoff, it wasn't the Ponzi scheme, but the tanking economy that did him in when his customers asked for their 7 billion back.
IOW, we pay the biggest bucks to the best psychopaths.
Wow is he really arguing that the fact people disagreed with his decisions proves they were the correct ones? That's our bush
Hey, Daulton? We don't care.
But, but...now we have a model for connecting to our 'decider-within'. Let's start a seminar.
I'll see you all at the First Annual Unleash Your Inner Decider Seminar this April in Tampa!
http://tinyurl.com/9g8llt
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