… at least according to the new poll from some of the mainstays of of the mainstream media. That number seems surprisingly low considering the hammering Bush took in the press and the percentage of people who would probably blame him if they ran out of toothpaste. It’s a kind of a weird projection syndrome these people are in. Mother Nature wreaks havoc. Got to find someone to blame. Oh, yeah… there’s Bush. He likes to play golf. Get him!
It reminds me of something I learned in Paris a couple of years back. The slang of disaffected Arab youth in the suburbs for something bad is feuj – a corruption of juif (Jew) spelled backwards. If something breaks or doesn’t work, like your ballpoint pen, it’s a feuj! You never had anything to do with its failure yourself. The Jews did it.
Of course, it doesn’t take Freud or Adler to see that this kind of projection is wildly self-destructive and practically overwhelms any chance for self-improvement or correction on the part of the blamer. So the obsession with Bush hatred practiced by many Democrats is a sure prescription for their losing again. In fact, when I came back from Asia and saw the endless jaberring about how Bush mishandled the hurricane (as if he were Neptune or Thor), I knew the Democrats were making fools of themselves with the public – with the media, as usual, playing their ironic enablers. (Who makes more Bush voters than Chris Matthews?) The minute Democrats forget or ignore Bush and start thinking about what they should do is the minute their party is on the road to recovery.
If I were the leader of the Democratic Party, I’d take my slogan from the I Ching: “Change, no Blame.”
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