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04/30/2005: "Irresistible Impulses"

The right wing has been painting itself into every corner in the room lately. The Midas touch many felt they displayed prior to the last election seems to have become a sadiM touch – Midas in reverse – with everything they handle becoming a color decidedly different from gold. We can go right down the list. First there’s Social Security, the issue our President thought he had enough political capital to zip through Congress with the same alacrity as his tax cut and benefit expansion “victories” of the last term. Now, every time Bush opens his mouth on the topic his numbers fall further. Perhaps he should try the same pitch in backwards English! Iraq certainly hasn’t been on a roll, unless one is talking about rolling downhill. The best face they can put on it (the “lipstick on the pig” as we are wont to say in my profession) is that it’s about the same as last year (dozens of billions of dollars later). And that was said before the latest spate of violence. Then consider recent pronouncements on gas prices and “energy strategy” (I’m sure it’s been a surprise for Clinton and Bush’s Dad to hear that they didn’t have an energy strategy!) From accelerated slurping that won’t deliver any actual gas for a decade, to handholding strolls with a Saudi prince, to his proposed Jerseyfication all the states with former military bases (i.e., all of them), the Bush Administration is clearly flailing. The list of missteps goes on to include predictably stalled in your face re-nominations of extremists, and, my personal favorite, ethical foot-shooting on a grand scale. I happen to believe that there is a pattern to all of this, and it explains lots. Here is the pattern: this is a group with a big impulse control problem! When they get an idea in their head, they feel that they just have to go full bore. It’s clear they see thinking through the likely consequences as Liberal behavior, in other words, behavior that’s suspect for being reality-based rather than faith-based. This trait actually worked for them for awhile. After the 9/11 attacks voters mistook lack of impulse control for decisiveness, considering how hungry the country was for decisive leadership (the kind not shown by a President caught like a deer in the headlights reading My Pet Goat while the country was under attack). It’s a manifestation of the larger problem with the extreme right wing – they seem to have an amazing blind spot when it comes to thinking through the simplest outcomes, if those outcomes occur over years as opposed to weeks. The big question is when voters will figure out that having an impulse control problem is not the same as decisiveness or strength of character. Or maybe they already are.