Pinhead

When you come right down to it, a small man, incredibly small, petty, vindictive. Not actually stupid, but lazy, and jealous of those who are actually intelligent and creative. A king-sized chip on his shoulder, who while not aware of anything to feel guilty about, swallows a lifetime of inadequacy to his marrow and carries (swaggering) it all into the biggest arena in the world, the American Presidency.

Such is the small-man, such is George Bush, such is the misfortune of our times and our everlasting shame:

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

It's not the banality of evil, so much as the banality of the last gasp of a dying ideology, determined to take a society with it.

Ultimately, you begin to wonder whether Bush thinks he has a murder-suicide pact with the country as a whole, and whether the broadcast media is thinking that's good for business (and profit is a reflection of patriotism, no?).