"Bush is not an imbecile. He's not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he's incapable of empathy. He has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he's a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."
"He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge... It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes."
"There's an episode of Happy Days, where The Fonz has to say, `I'm sorry' and can't do it. Same thing," Miller said.
If this is true, what does it say about middle-America's national character that Bush is one of the most popular presidents in history? Perhaps he is the natural leader for a country (and world) habituated to real-life cop shows and action thrillers, for whom the language of violence and vengeance, an eye for an eye, resonates deeply?
Then again. television probably has little to do with it, at least at that end of the causal chain. Perhaps Bush is the classic atavistic alpha-male, the strong, inflexible, vengeful despot whose thuggish charisma is irresistible to the masses and has been throughout time; even some of those who find it intellectually repugnant are drawn to it by a deeper, more primal instinct; they submit, as programmed by millions of years of evolution to do, and accept him as their true leader. The only thing new is that the act is adapted for the age of the soundbite.
perhaps it does say something about humanity when we can only choose as our leaders those who we think can lead and protect us because of their capacity for violence. Mary Shelley had it right when she wrote "Frankenstein". Oft times the monster we create out of our ego obsession then turns upon us to our dismay.