Bush wasn’t as dumb as his reputation. A lot of it is that he was bad on his feet and not a particularly verbally fluent person to begin with. Contrasted to his opponent Al Gore, who actually is a sharp knife, he seemed out of his depths in his introduction to the country. He was a bad president and if it hadn’t been for Iraq (I still don’t know why we invaded) he would be remembered as a middling president fitting of his gentlemanly post-presidential role.

Honestly I’ve been having thoughts that democracy is really the best system in the internet- and mass-media age. (Tommy Tuberville is absolutely unqualified on several levels to be a senator.) An enlightened despot comes along too rarely to be hoped for. Maybe have the elite citizenry vote for the leaders, whatever kind of qualification there should be. Hell, maybe just a current-events quiz.

I fucked up in my last post when I said Obama’s first Congress got nothing done. Obamacare was in 2010, duh. But when the Democrats swept into office there were these lofty expectations – as there well should have been, since they had a filibuster-proof majority – of single-payer health care, truth-and-reconciliation hearings of Bush-era officials in the Senate, a whole center-left realignment that would last a generation. The economic crisis obviously took some of the wind out of those sails, but the progressive transformation resulted basically in FINRA and another layer of bureaucratic scaffolding on the rotting hulk of our health-insurance system.