Sunday, July 2, 2006 | 7:40 a.m.
President George W. Bush should have grown up in my house. He would have learned an important and very helpful lesson.
My father was a very tolerant man when it came to his children. He had to be because the challenges were great. But there was one thing he insisted on that we would never be. One thing that he drilled in our heads that was intolerable. One thing that he could never abide in his kids.
And that was being arrogant. To be fair, we never discussed murder or other heinous crimes, but when it came to the ordinary human failings, my dad made it quite clear that he was not in the business of raising arrogant human beings.
As I watch the president's popularity polls and job approval ratings continue to drop - and like the brilliant Thomas Friedman I marvel that there are still 30-some percent of the American people who still think our president is doing a good job - I am convinced that the American people are not giving up on him because they don't believe he wants what's best for us. No, I think the reason is much simpler and more easily understood than that.
We the people may be slow to act, lazy at times, gullible and too trusting. But we are not stupid, and eventually we all come to a realization about what is what.
I think the people have figured out that President Bush's main failing is that he is arrogant. Either in the way he treats us or in the way he allows those in his administration to treat us. And the people are rebelling in the only way we know how - by pulling our support of his actions, of his presidency and of his policies. That is both unfortunate, because some of his policies are deserving of support, and inevitable, because no one wants to be taken for granted.
The latest blow to his presidency is the Supreme Court's anticipated rebuke of his Guantanamo project. No one in his right mind wants to let bad people out on the street, especially the kind of people who couldn't care less whether they live or die and, by extension, whether or not we live or die. Whether they are hidden away in Cuba or some other country willing to lock them up forever, most Americans just want to know that they are safely put away. There is a proper, lawful way to do all of that, and then - and here comes the arrogant part - there is the way the president decided to proceed.
What the Supreme Court said, except for the ideologues, is that he did it wrong. The justices said that we are a nation of laws and not men, and that means we have to abide by those laws. If we don't like them, change them. If they don't work, rewrite them. But do it in a way that the Constitution dictates. Period. And if that means that the president has to ask Congress for immediate help, that's what he has to do because that is what he took an oath to do - remember that part?
OK, so maybe President Bush knew all along that he was doing it wrong but figured by the time it got to the Supreme Court the war would be over and all would be quickly forgotten. That brings me to another reason why arrogance got the best of him.
Had the president listened to his generals instead of ignoring sound but possibly more expensive and contentious advice about necessary troop levels, we might not be in the fix we are in Iraq. That is not a statement about whether or not we should be there, just how and how long we should be there. The American people are convinced that President Bush, for some reason, didn't listen to the people who knew what to do. Could that be arrogance?
And, in the face of his falling numbers and loss of some core support, what is the Bush administration doing now? It is looking for scapegoats, and it has found an easy target. The media. Just like his counterparts in communist China who are doing what they can to control what the people of China learn from their media, President Bush and his colleagues are calling for penalties against our media - specifically The New York Times - for publishing what the administration claims is classified information.
Give me a break. The American people may have been the only folks in the world who did not know that the CIA, NSA and the rest of the alphabet agencies were looking at every financial transaction conducted on the face of the planet.
What they also didn't know is that all of their transactions were also being scrutinized, and that is what the newspaper thought the American people had a right to know. We still have a Fourth Amendment - not much of one since the Roberts Court did its best to emasculate it the other day - which means Americans, conservatives and liberals, have a right to expect a measure of privacy in their personal, private transactions.
Just because the newspaper believes a citizens' right to know what is happening to his private records is greater than the president's desire to keep that secret, is no reason to threaten reporters, editors and owners with jail. Not to mention all the petty politicians who pile on with ridiculous claims of treason. Politicians, I might add, who have done nothing or very close to it, to make sure the president adheres to the Constitution's mandates.
We live in uncertain times. We are uncertain how to deal with an enemy that doesn't mind and, in fact, looks forward to being killed. We are uncertain how to extend the necessary security to all Americans while, at the same time, protecting the very rights for which our boys and girls are dying in wars around the world. And we are uncertain what the roles of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are in these trying times.
It takes a high degree of arrogance to believe that only one person knows the answer to all of these questions and which will give justification for that person to go it alone. That is compounded by a Congress that is frozen in its tracks by a paralyzing partisanship that makes the lawmakers impotent. And it is further muddled by a Supreme Court more interested in its new ideological directives than its traditional role of looking out for the little guy by adhering to constitutional protections.
Mix all that together and you get an American people who are fed up. We are also very concerned about where this country is going in a world that looks at us, for perhaps the first time, with a sense of distrust and dismay.
And so we look for reasons. And the best I can come up with is that one failing that my father admonished us about so many years ago. He told us that we would lose the respect of others if we acted arrogantly. President Bush has lost the respect of so many Americans who have wanted so much to respect him. And I think the reason is simple.
When the times have called for understanding, knowledge and the intellectual capacity to comprehend the almost incomprehensible, all we have gotten from this administration is arrogance.
Unfortunately, there is far more than a president's popularity that hangs in the balance. For right now, though, there is his popularity. I would think that, at the very least, a bit more humility would be in order.
archive
