Why Won't Dubya Apologize?
Botched 9/11 info, two botched wars, a gutted economy, global scorn. Why
can't W be a man?
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist


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There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect
beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper
and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening
flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time
sorry sorry sorry.

We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own
ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel
without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions
on a daily basis because, well, we are just wired this way. Just ask Mel
"Spurtin' Blood" Gibson -- I mean, how much more wrong can you get?

But then comes the hard part: We apologize. Profusely and maybe even a bit
meekly, we ask for forgiveness or at least offer an olive branch and
recognize our shared messy humanness as the thing that differentiates us
from the saccharine sexless drone people of the world -- like, you know,
Laura Bush. Shudder.

But then there's Dubya. He is, apparently, immune. He is perfect and
flawless and without the slightest taint of guilt or error, and, despite
looking like a bowl of Jell-O salad in a universe of divine tiramisu, he is,
apparently, an angel of purity and light. It's true.

For here is Dubya, mumbling his way through another shockingly insulting
news conference just recently, screwing up both his face and his
intelligence data (again) and still a-huntin' for nonexistent WMDs in Libyan
turkey farms (?) as reporter after reporter asks him, point blank, why he
won't simply come clean.

They ask him, repeatedly, why he cannot find a single mistake in any policy
his slithery admin has unleashed upon the nation, much less confess to any
rampant missteps and botched decisions and oily ulterior motives and blatant
screw-ups regarding 9/11 and Saddam and WMDs and his fetish for warmongering
and for rewriting intelligence data to suit his corporate needs, all while
taking more vacations than any president in history.

His answer? Nope. Nossiree, no mistakes were made. In fact, we as a nation
are more on track than ever and hey lookit my shiny new boots okey doke
thanks fer comin' gotta run. Plants wilted, children cried, even
semicomatose cats couldn't help but wince at Bush's weird deflections and
alcoholism-grade denials. What a surreal and sad country we swim in.

Why won't Bush admit he got 9/11 at least partially wrong? Why won't he
acknowledge, at the very least -- as even longtime egomaniacal terrorism
wonk Richard Clarke had the calm cojones to do -- that the U.S. ain't
perfect and the government could've done much (much, much) better and hey
we're flawed and we're learning and sorry, everyone, for the bloodbath and
the malevolence and the rampant ongoing death and the 100 dead U.S. soldiers
in the past month alone?


It is not too much to ask. It is not wildly out of the question. Sure,
everyone knows all politicians across the planet -- and U.S. Republican
politicians in particular -- are genetically engineered to loathe truth,
programmed from birth to shun responsibility and reject blame and screech at
honest fact like Lynne Cheney denies her bodice-ripping lesbian fantasies.

But surely even politicians have limits. And surely one of his puppeteers
must've told Dubya that, often, a politician's ratings actually rise when he
admits to human error and faulty ideology. Richard Clarke's astounding
contrition slapped the nation with the shocking proof that it can be done,
gracefully and with potent honesty. Hell, even former FBI Director Louis
Freeh admitted his bureau made mistakes and did the best it could, given the
flawed info it had.

Maybe it's faux-macho Texas pride. Maybe it's dumb-guy humiliation, that
feeling that if Bush admits to just one of his policy defects, it's a
slippery slope toward admitting he hasn't had much of a clue as to what's
going on in his administration since pronouncing our country's name as
"'Murka" in his swearing-in ceremony.

Or maybe it's all about God. Maybe it's because Dubya still genuinely
believes he's divinely inspired, that he's truly doing the Lord's work by
sanctimoniously blowing the living crap out of ragtag nations and allowing
American GIs to die for his administration's hollow and increasingly
indefensible political stratagems, and to admit personal error is to admit
error in his overall pseudo-religious worldview.

In other words: I am God's chosen one. I cannot possibly be wrong, because
God cannot possibly be wrong. Dubya, have you met Mr. Gibson?

'Course, it doesn't stop with Bush. Who could help but recoil in savage
colonic pain as a freeze-dried and well-crusted John Ashcroft plopped his
pious, dance-free butt down at the 9/11 hearings and proceeded to spend
three hours pointing his scraggy finger at the Clinton administration? Way
to go, Johnny. Way to shoulder that intellectual acumen. Make this country
proud, honey.

Who, furthermore, could not help but let out a groan of pathos as Condi
Rice, friendless and alone and looking weirdly, increasingly mechanical and
limp and completely drained of all feminine fire, dutifully lied her ass off
and regurgitated policy and stood by her man?

Look. The ability to offer up honest apology is a gift. To apologize shows
intelligence. It shows humanity. It is soft and honest and real, and to
admit fallibility is entirely human and increasingly rare -- and, obviously,
it is everything a hypocritical politician is not.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is, after all, too much to ask. After all, we as a
nation have become jaded beyond words and have come to expect this level of
appalling denial from our leaders, come to understand this as the overriding
maxim of our time: We can never admit our country might, just might, be
wrong.

There is simply no room for apology in American politics. There is no room
for showing strength of character by admitting that our shiny all-American
armor is, in fact, full of cracks and rust holes and is actually made by
exhausted 10-year-old girls in a Malaysian sweatshop.

This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you
might've made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well,
that sort of humility doesn't sit well with the hawks and the corporate
profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward
nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian
Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead
soldiers in Iraq.

And there is, tragically, only more numb, shell-shocked citizens and weeping
families of the dead, all begging for someone, somewhere, to offer up just a
single note of apology, of contrition, of hope and common recognition of the
sad tragicomic circus in which we all perform.

This is all anyone is really asking for from our leaders, finally. Just a
glimmer of our shared messiness, a common understanding of our collective
awe, a single hint of that most tragically rare of current commodities:
humanity.