Visiting blue family in a red state

Light blogging this weekend; I'm visiting some liberal family members living in a blue enclave in a red state. But while strugging to try to read my regular blogs using an AOL dialup connection (and aging rapidly while I wait for pages to load, this post from Daily Kos, referencing Bob Herbert's New York Times column yesterday, is worth noting:

As I watch the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies unfold - not just in Iraq, but here at home as well - I am struck by the immaturity of this administration, whatever the ages of the officials involved. It's as if the children have taken over and sent the adults packing. The counsel of wiser heads, like George H. W. Bush, or Brent Scowcroft, or Colin Powell, is not needed and not wanted.



Some of the world's most important decisions - often, decisions of life and death - have been left to those who are less competent and less experienced, to men and women who are deficient in such qualities as risk perception and comprehension of future consequences, who are reckless and dangerously susceptible to magical thinking and the ideological pressure of their peers.



I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone.

This got me thinking about filial rejection as an underlying mindset for way too many of the Bushies. Ari Fliecher and his Democratic parents. Dick Cheney, who's dad was a federal civil servant and whose mentors included the eminently decent Gerald Ford. Donald Rumsfeld, a Congressional ally of Ford's, and an aide to Nixon. And Karl Rove...well, there's way too much material there for a quick psycho-political assessment.



I've long thought of the neocons as approaching politics like a graduate seminar, where the goal is to distinguish oneself with flashy rhetoric and verbal gamesmanship, preferably by constructing and then demolishing straw man arguments. But Herbert may be on to something: this administration, especially in terms of its foreign and defense policy, may be a big exercise in saying screw you to, in addition to most of the world and nearly half the country, the administration members' own elders, mentors, and parents.

Isn't it ironic, then, that the people running the show, with all their vociferous contempt for the 60's, are the ones STILL rebelling against their parents? At least the rest of us got it out of our system when we were still in our teens and twenties. A 50-year-old who's still angry at his dad is just pathetic. Too bad the pathetic 50-year-old with daddy issues, and the rest of his cronies, also with daddy issues, have the power to order the shedding of blood with such cruel abandon.