“A Stroke of Genius?” – Moon of Alabama

July 30, 2005

“A Stroke of Genius?”

"It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile."
Powerline: A Stroke of Genius?

"I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal."
Richard Wagner quotes

Posted by b on July 30, 2005 at 22:31 UTC | Permalink

Comments

“he can’t get anyone to notice”
so true

Posted by: Friendly Fire | Jul 30 2005 22:37 utc | 1

bush has all the leadership capacity of matty the horse of the geneovese crime family who is under indictment. that is to say not much, not much at all

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 30 2005 23:40 utc | 2

Vision and brilliance? I guess if we’re talking about myopia or tunnel vision, then okay. And brilliance? I can’t even touch that one. He’s an utter failure, as a President and as a purported Christian.
Oh, he just sucks.

Posted by: ides | Jul 30 2005 23:57 utc | 3

Maybe the poster is trying to lead a completely sarcastic life.

Posted by: stoy | Jul 31 2005 0:01 utc | 4

Hmm I suspect the author of the article on Bush’s genius has been so overcome with the reflected glow from his beloved leader that he has missed the obvious solution to this ‘problem’. His amazingly insightful comment “I doubt that the pact will make any difference to the earth’s climate, which will be determined, as always, by variations in the energy emitted by the sun.” which shows an amazing capacity to see through the BS of current scientific thought, also carries the germ of a solution. A rheostat! A giant rheostat connected to the sun so that when it gets too hot we just turn down the sun. Just like with a light dimmer at home we will be able to create the exact ambiance required.
The advantages of this approach are manifest firstly it will be a great opportunity for good old US know how to develop and construct the dimmer. Secondly the churlish might argue that forcing China and India to ‘get by’ on a lower standard of technology (because no emmision system could be 100% effective if we want to keep their emmissions down they will simply have to ‘tighten their belts’ a bit) may mean that we end up paying more for our Nikes! Since that would plainly be insufferable and could in fact cause considerable damage to the mighty, always the main priority, but sometimes forgotten and nevertheless much loved US economy.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 31 2005 0:14 utc | 5

C’mon, guys this is the “Blog of the Year”.
Of course, this is from Time magazine, where a recent cover story noticed the “strong” housing market.
Can anyone say bubble?

Posted by: doug r | Jul 31 2005 1:03 utc | 6

Bush may be brilliant, but those guys at Powerline are no dummies either. Check out the one phrase refutation of 100 years of climatology – by a fellow who didn’t need no fancy scientific degree or “evidence”.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 31 2005 1:59 utc | 7

Debs, great tongue in cheek on your post, but there’s something to be said for “John 3:01’s” effusive praise of Bush in his comment about the sun, which others have commented on, the sun is, in fact, in a hellashush solar cycle right now, and the moon is as close to the earth and low on the horizon as anytime in the last fifty years.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/varsun.html
Another unexpected event not directly relateable to global warming, a jet of hot tropical water and associated weather disruption shot towards BC
this spring, right after the Indonesian tsunamai disrupted the earth’s orbit measureably.
The result has been catastrophic changes over a single season in the near-shore Gulf of Alaska phytoplankton, decreasing by 80%, and the near- complete disappearance of this year’s expected near-normal salmon returns, clear from Northern California up to the Yukon River, probably due to schooling tuna carried far, far north of normal, as an apex predator of salmon.
Anecdotal reports show tuna are being caught as close as ten miles to the Washington State coast and to Vancouver Island, something that no one in seventy years can remember ever happening before.
That all may be a global warming “trigger event”, where climate suddenly goes asymptotic as the atmosphere slowly warms, but you can’t simply dismiss solar cycles and tsunamai’s and undersea volcanoes having bigger immediate effects.
It would be as unscientific to poo-poo solar activity and tsunamai/earthquake/volcanoes, as it was for George Bush to say, “Global warming is pure science fiction.” And it may also be unscientific to say a potentially large solar effect is less important than a predicted small global climate change, just as it would be unscientific and antideluvian to ignore the possibility that a small climate change we find to be insignificant, could, say, wipe out the bee population and in a single season, destroy most agricultural fruit production, or bring on an otherwise minor drought at the wrong time in an uneventful growing season, causing massive drop in production of dry legumes and grains, as is happening right now this season in the US.
Get your peanuts before the price goes up!

Posted by: lash marks | Jul 31 2005 7:00 utc | 8

No, I take these comments to be sincere. I actually think those in orbit around Bush cast a wistful aesthetic gaze toward the man, as some kind of republican version of a mystic sage. To them he must be remarkable indeed, as he , like many of them, has been born, bred, and coached into a nepotistic world of privilege for favor. He, however, has risin (compared to them) meteorically to the stratosphere of achievement, with in all likelyhood, a lot less intellegence, motivation, and vision than themselves. Theres really no easy way to explain it, sure theres the cowboy image thing, the religion thing, which work pretty well in politics, but does’nt explain fully the rapid accumulation of power within the establishment, and I think thats where the awe really kicks in. What I’m talking about here is a sublime worship of ambition. And if theres anything more dear to the heart of the republican id than ambition, I dont know what it could be — for ambition is the willpower to succeed, in and of itself . And in Bushes case ambition is singular in that it trumps all methods and morality and humanity while naturally condeming any skepticism as self loathing if not treason. So sure, Bush is transcendent in that he is unfettered by reality, plying his genius works of personified corporate ambition into ever greater heights of exclusivity through the willful exhalation of every last vestage of empathy, humanity, and morality.

Posted by: anna missed | Jul 31 2005 8:59 utc | 9

“An artist becomes a statesman, and his historic work reveals his remarkable abilities. He needs no external honors; his greatest honor is the enduring permanence of his labors.
“But we who have the good fortune to be near him each day receive light from his light and want only to be obedient followers behind his flag.
“May a gracious fate ordain that he live the longest, that for many decades the nation will continue under his leadership along the path to new freedom, greatness and power. That is the honest and passionate wish that the entire German nation lays in thankfulness at his feet.
“Not only we who stand near him, but the last man in the most distant village, join in saying:
“He is now what he always was, and always will be: Our Hitler!”
— Joseph Goebbels, 1935

Posted by: Antifa | Jul 31 2005 10:27 utc | 10

Give me a break. This analogy really does go too far. To all accounts, Adolf Hitler was an effective public speaker.

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 31 2005 11:11 utc | 11

To avoid misunderstanding, perhaps I should add this:
🙂

Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Jul 31 2005 11:18 utc | 12

Jassalasca: not to mention the fact that Hitler managed to actually wipe out the French and British armies in a few weeks, and to effectively occupy France, which wasn’t a 3rd world country weakened by 12 years of sanctions and repeated bombings. Sure, in the long run Hitler was a catastrophic military strategist bent on magic thinking, but Bush is closer to Mussolini when it comes to military adventurism.
I hope that this mediocrity of W will reflect in everything else, and that his final death record will be closer to Benito’s than to Adolf’s.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Jul 31 2005 19:46 utc | 13

CJ,
The Mussolini analogy is more adept than Hitler in that some (many?) of the neocons (Ledeen) would agree with it. But then again we have the same public speaking problem. Although Bush is pretty good at strutting in public, but thern again, I have a couple of roosters in my yard that might give him pause.

Posted by: anna missed | Jul 31 2005 20:12 utc | 14

I suspect that the suggestion in the juxtaposition of the words of Hindrocket and Wagner — who unwittingly wrote the themes for the Third Reich — would be lost on most neo-conservative readers. These people seem to be without, both, a sense of their own historic antecedents and an awareness of the consequences of fascism (of course, it’s possible that they suffer from the American teenager’s delusion, the one that tells them that the same things just won’t happen to them.) Certainly, it’s a relief that the Bush clique is as inept as Musslini’s fascists; however, their bully boy stance, brinksmanship and apparent hatred for the world I’ve known in my lifetime make them a standing danger to all but the least evolved life forms on this planet.

Posted by: optional | Aug 1 2005 21:18 utc | 15

Finally, something on which the left and right would agree! “Bush is no Hitler!”.

Posted by: PeeDee | Aug 1 2005 21:48 utc | 16

I am struck by the change in mood from “the situation is hopeless” in some of the past few day’s discussions, to one here of “Thank God, Cheney’s front man is a bungler!”. Is this just manic depression at work?

Posted by: PeeDee | Aug 1 2005 21:50 utc | 17

“I have long been convinced that my artistic ideal stands or falls with Germany. Only the Germany that we love and desire can help us achieve that ideal.”
It’s true the Powerline bund wouldn’t have been out of place in Germany history. But the particular period I’m thinking of came a number of decades after Wagner’s death.
Although some of the great composer’s more . . . xenophobic views had a certain relevancy then, too.

Posted by: Billmon | Aug 1 2005 22:28 utc | 18

Billmon probably means Wagner’s … less prosemitic views?

Posted by: teuton | Aug 1 2005 22:49 utc | 19

The Mussolini analogy is more adept than Hitler in that some (many?) of the neocons (Ledeen) would agree with it.
Actually, if there’s any close historical analogy it’s to Vichy France. Italian Fascism and German Nazism were ideologies with a certain amount of internal consistency. In contrast the contemporary American Right represents an incoherent mishmash of contradictory aims and old grudges, resembling more than anything else the intellectual muddle of the pre-WW2 French Right. Comprenay?

Posted by: Disassembler | Aug 2 2005 14:17 utc | 20

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