1115.org

Eric Alterman points us to an Op-Ed by novelist E.L. Doctorow

…this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

Read the whole thing. It is about as powerful a piece of writing as I have seen in a long time.

You will remember during the 2000 election that we were to be reassured that all of then-candidate Bush’s advisors were old pros and they would counsel him through anything. Setting aside for a moment the results of that particular strategy, advisors are powerless to impart the proper emotions and sense of weight to a man so demonstrably incapable of said feelings.

Oh, but you want a tough guy President? One who looks danger in the face and says “Feelin’ lucky, punk?” But do you want a President who actually does that, or one who just tries to project the image.

Wouldn’t a real tough guy scoff at hiding the results of his actions? You might remember the controversy stemming from Tami Silicio’s photos of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq.

The there is the matter of the President’s carefully screened and managed campaign events. Oops:

Q: Mr. President, if the war on terrorism continues, do you feel that there will be a need for the draft? And do you want to start the draft again?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, first of all, the war on terror will continue. It’s going to take awhile. And, no, we don’t need a draft. What we need to do is — don’t worry about it.

Ahhh, so maybe he is that tough guy after all. Don’t worry about it.

I wonder if he means for us not to worry about Selective Service Board activity, the Individual Ready Reserve call-ups, or the bills in congress that would initiate a full scale draft for both men and women.

But that takes us back to his understanding of the gravity of his actions and their consequences. How can a man who doesn’t fully value sacrifice, service, and most of all, death be trusted to make these decisions?

I’ll leave you with this from Doctrow:

How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.