It’s more than a little bizarre when the most convincing explanation I’ve seen yet of Bush’s actions in office is that he is actually an Iranian agent…
Surveying the vast wasteland that George W. Bush has made of American governance, even the most sophisticated observer is driven to ask, like the simple son at a Passover seder, what is all this?
The most compelling hypothesis so far is that we have not one president but two. Or, rather, two shadow presidents. Domestic policy is the land of Karl Rove — ruthless, cynical, malign yet cunning. As Paul O’Neill has told us, politics trumps principle at every turn, and rather than the agenda of small-government conservatism, liberal ideas and programs are turned into a disciplined machine aimed at securing Republican hegemony and corporate profits.
Abroad, however, we are in Dick Cheney’s world, where grand visions meet a naïveté that would be almost touching had it not gotten so many people killed. In both domains, a disregard for the facts dominates, but whereas the home front features well-crafted lies aimed at securing the president’s political future, on foreign policy the administration seems to be genuinely out of touch with reality. I, myself, badly misjudged the Iraq War out of false overestimation of Bush’s cynicism. Surely, I thought, the naysayers were wrong and the war would turn out well, for it clearly wasn’t in the president’s political interest to produce the current debacle.
But while the “two presidents” theory has some merit, it is unsatisfying both intellectually and emotionally. As in physics, where quantum field theory and general relativity coexist uneasily, we yearn for a grand unified theory of Bushism that would put the two halves of the agenda together. Now, at last, with the revelation that Ahmad Chalabi has been passing intelligence information to the regime in Iran, the opportunity presents itself to construct just such a unified theory. The truth, hard as it is to accept, is that Bush is an Iranian agent.
Admittedly this theory suffers from a lack of direct empirical evidence. Nevertheless, by presenting this single bold conjecture, we can explain everything in a neat, tidy package. By Occam’s razor, then, the theory must be accepted. Hear me out.
It’s so far-fetched that it can’t possibly actually be true, of course.
Or could it? ;)
(via Atrios)
iTunes: “III. Allegro fugato from Sonata No. 5 in D Major for Cello and Piano, Op. 102, No. 2” by Ax, Emanuel/Ma, Yo-Yo from the album Sony Classical: Great Performances 1903-1998 (1983, 4:47).