Flip-flops aren’t just for the beach

October 14, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

Walking to work the other day, I passed by a row of newspaper boxes. Two headlines caught my eye.

The Washington Post carried a story headlined, “[tag]Bush[/tag] Stands Firm on Policies.” Next to it, USA Today blared, “All-Time High in Baghdad Violence: Sectarian Killings More Than Triple.”

I could only sigh.

Republicans are fond of tarring [tag]Democrats[/tag] as flip-floppers. Well, we could sure use a flip-flopper right now. We desperately need a reverse in course, and from where I’m sitting, nothing less than a full-fledged [tag]flip-flop[/tag] will do the trick.

Consistency can be a virtue. But being consistently wrong is not. It’s great to declare yourself “The [tag]Decider[/tag]” — unless every decision you make is wrong.

We are humans, and sometimes we do stupid things. When that happens, we have no option but to change course. When I was 18, I was a libertarian conservative and fan of Ayn Rand. It was easy to adopt an outlandish political philosophy at that age, since I had no experience with the real world. (I had also not read much real literature and thus did not know just how lousy Rand’s books are as fiction.) As I got older and engaged the world as an adult with a job and responsibilities, I quickly saw the flaws in that particular perspective and shed it.

[tag]President[/tag] [tag]George W. Bush[/tag] strikes me as the kind of guy who has never had an experience like that. He has never reconsidered an opinion. He has never looked at something in the light of new evidence. He has never been persuaded by a good argument.

I once heard a conservative speaker laud Bush for having a backbone of steel. He meant is as a compliment, but to me it only underscored what is perhaps Bush’s worst trait: He’s inflexible, dug-in, impervious to facts and dogmatic.

Remember, a spine of steel makes it impossible to bend even a little, let alone pull off a full-blown flip-flop.

“Flip-flopping” has become so derogatory, but reconsidering one’s opinion is a key part in good decision making. Ugh! How I wish Kerry had not given that soft-pitch lob of a sound byte: “I was for the war before I was against it” (or whatever it was)… That was so painful to see on so many ads.

I think the “spine of steel” is the underlying theme of this administration’s folly. Allowing for conflicting ideas breeds well-informed decisions, and BushCo is so unwilling to bend, that even mildly desenting Republicans get ignored (read: fired). Hence, the abundance of poor decisions.

  • Consistency can be a virtue. But being consistently wrong is not.

    Thanks Morbo. Great line. I think you’re right. Bush needs a chiropractor of the brain.

  • A backbone of steel can be bent—it just doesn’t have any flexibility. Herr Bush’s backbone is apparently bent into the form of a boomerang; everything he tries something it goes out, comes around, and hits someone in the face. That may explain part of why the GOP looks rather pummeled right now.

    Or, perhaps that “spine” is more in the shape of a crowbar, with which to beat dead horses with (those dead horses, of course, being the entire agenda of his administration).

    Then again, it could be an anvil—or an anchor—either of which is tied ’round the collective neck of his “friends” as though a metalurgical albatross

  • Never fear, on November 8, Bush 41’s team will crawl out of the rubble and ruins of Junior’s presidency and set up a regency to care for things in the following two years, and 43 will finally get all that brush cleared down at the Prairie Chapel pig farm. We can already begin to see this in the leaks now coming out of the formerly leakproof commission Consiglieri James Baker is running to come up with the way to get B’rer Bush and B’rer Cheney out of the tarbaby and get the tar cleaned off them.

    As reported in the London Times:

    The Baker commission has grown increasingly interested in the idea of splitting the Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish regions of Iraq as the only alternative to what Baker calls “cutting and running” or “staying the course”.

    ….His group will not advise “partition”, but is believed to favour a division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions, leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs, border protection and the distribution of oil revenue.

    Even Leslie Gelb, a longtime proponent of this idea, is pessimistic. “Everything is a long shot at this point,” he says.

    Juan Cole is more emphatic: “This is a very bad idea for so many reasons it would take me forever to list them all.”

    But it will put Brain Boy and Deadeye where they can’t do further damage, at least.

  • Spine of steel, heart of stone and head of solid bone… Yup, that’s our Chimperor, all right.

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