New Cities/New Soviets

December 21, 2004

Flan of the Year

Ugh. Could Time Magazine be any more servile than to call this soft-bake cookie an "american revolutionary"?

Their reasons: "confident" and "polarizing". Hmm. "Polarizing" I'll leave for another post, I've been planning one for a while. But "confident"? That demands immediate rebuke.

Bush is not confident. And I have a deep hatred of the "confident". But Bush doesn't even rise to that dubious standard. He is simply smug.

What's the difference, you say? I've long argued that "confidence" leads directly to smugness. But at least confidence is a response to a real-world encounter with adversity, and places a real stake in the outcome of events.

Bush feels way above all that. If there are any stakes in his life, they are no more important than the outcome of one of the ivy-league sporting events he was a cheerleader for, or a tedious (and futile) competition with dear ole dad.

Don't believe me? He proves it every time he opens his mouth. Take the clip I watched approximately 500 times on the overnight news feed: he references a press conference "the other day in the Oval"—no "office", just "oval". This is not homespun or country or merely stupid, this is not casual or confident, this is a prep-school self-preening vocab, and embodies a flippant disregard for the danger and risk felt by other, "lesser" men.

Posted by Sam at December 21, 2004 09:29 AM

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