Nostalgie

Un des premiers messages de blogs que j'aie jamais lus devait être Josh Marshall en 2001 (en le relisant, je vois qu'à l'époque il disait encore du bien de Joe Lieberman et même de Jonah Goldberg (!)).

Et j'y ai enfin retrouvé un vieil article du WSJ de février 2001 où l'archi-conservateur britannique Tunku Varadjaran dit, très sérieusement, que la supériorité naturelle de George W. Bush prouve l'intérêt d'un régime aristocratique (cela fait 8 ans que je le recherchais).

Some readers might find my use of the word "breeding" old-fashioned, but I fear there is no substitute. The Bushes have impeccable political breeding. Mr. Clinton has none. He is a political parvenu; a sparkling man, no doubt, and a man of vast intelligence, but he has no personal institutional memory. Consequently, his lack of respect for institutions--for his own office--came to be more pronounced. He wasn't to the manor born, so the manor became to him a source not of comfort, or of calm, or of a sense of service, but one of glee and fantasy and vainglory. And these sentiments--this unseemly sense of having "made it big," of having hit the jackpot--spread like a rash to his wife, to his siblings, to his wife's siblings, to his underlings, her underlings, their underlings.

Mr. Bush, for all the dire warnings we were given about his intellect and about the irreparable harm of a court-ordered victory, has slipped so smoothly into his role as president as to suggest that high office runs in his blood. I detect, I think, the purr of an atavistic motor. I detect the workings of a man who is at peace with power, and with the stewardship of a nation. Mr. Bush is at ease at the pinnacle, just as he was at ease, earlier, with the inevitability of his rise.

Contrast Mr. Bush's comfort in office with Mr. Clinton's luxuriation in it. This difference reveals the greatest paradox, as well as the greatest difference between the two men. Mr. Clinton, who took office the "hard way," had, from the start, a bursting sense of entitlement. From Mr. Bush's privilege, by contrast, flows a sense of sober authority, of a circumscribed trusteeship.

Whom would you rather have as president? The privileged man, or the entitled one?

Je crois que c'est le sommet de l'humour involontaire dans la stupidité burkienne.

Il faut la candeur réactionnaire du WSJ pour défendre l'idéologie des Castes héréditaires. On croirait une satire tirée de the Onion, un peu commme celle-là.

Pour voir dans le sens inverse, un journaliste de NBC se plaint en ce moment qu'Obama est ennuyeux car il est connaît trop bien le dossier du Health Care.

Et ces tarés de Newsweek aiment tant la Présidence Bush qu'ils préconisent qu'Obama nomme Bush Emissaire spécial au Proche-Orient pour négocier le processus de paix. C'est vrai que Bush y a montré tant d'efficacité.