(no subject)
From Gene Weingarten's 9/26 Online Chat:
I spent many days contemplating what it meant ["it" is the response he got to a stark criticism of Bush, calling him one of the worst presidents ever, in which people strongly defended Bush and even called him one of the BEST presidents ever], and decided it was an example of the boiling frog paradox. As the story goes (it is almost certainly apocryphal), if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately leap out, recognizing the environment to be lethal. But if you put a frog in tepid water that you then slowly bring to a boil, the frog will not notice the gradual temperature change, and boil to death.
I think that is what is going on with Bush stalwarts. I think the dreadful events of the last five years have so gradually lowered our expectations that people simply do not realize what a catastrophically horrible and inept presidency we are suffering through. What if, on September 12, 1991 [he surely means 2001], we had all been informed that in the space of the next five years, our government would have:
-- Completely squandered all the goodwill and sympathy and moral authority we earned on 9/11, to the point where we are almost universally hated and mistrusted.
-- Failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden! Five years!
-- Argued seriously for the right to torture prisoners.
-- Carried out an invasion of a foreign country for a single stated reason that proved completely wrong.
-- Did not, as people were told to expect, march into Iraq as liberators in a short war that would pay for itself. Instead, got mired in an obviously unwinnable, seemingly endless conflict allegedly to liberate a country that patently does not want us there and will collapse in civil war the instant we leave if not before, a war that has spread us so thin we cannot actually pursue terrorists effectively worldwide...
-- Hellishly burdened our economy for years to come on this misbegotten adventure.
-- And so forth and so on.
But too much time has passed. Too much of a constant diet of small failures, so that, like the frog, we have simply lost track of what we once expected of this administration. We're boiling to death, and don't know it.
Wow.
I spent many days contemplating what it meant ["it" is the response he got to a stark criticism of Bush, calling him one of the worst presidents ever, in which people strongly defended Bush and even called him one of the BEST presidents ever], and decided it was an example of the boiling frog paradox. As the story goes (it is almost certainly apocryphal), if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately leap out, recognizing the environment to be lethal. But if you put a frog in tepid water that you then slowly bring to a boil, the frog will not notice the gradual temperature change, and boil to death.
I think that is what is going on with Bush stalwarts. I think the dreadful events of the last five years have so gradually lowered our expectations that people simply do not realize what a catastrophically horrible and inept presidency we are suffering through. What if, on September 12, 1991 [he surely means 2001], we had all been informed that in the space of the next five years, our government would have:
-- Completely squandered all the goodwill and sympathy and moral authority we earned on 9/11, to the point where we are almost universally hated and mistrusted.
-- Failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden! Five years!
-- Argued seriously for the right to torture prisoners.
-- Carried out an invasion of a foreign country for a single stated reason that proved completely wrong.
-- Did not, as people were told to expect, march into Iraq as liberators in a short war that would pay for itself. Instead, got mired in an obviously unwinnable, seemingly endless conflict allegedly to liberate a country that patently does not want us there and will collapse in civil war the instant we leave if not before, a war that has spread us so thin we cannot actually pursue terrorists effectively worldwide...
-- Hellishly burdened our economy for years to come on this misbegotten adventure.
-- And so forth and so on.
But too much time has passed. Too much of a constant diet of small failures, so that, like the frog, we have simply lost track of what we once expected of this administration. We're boiling to death, and don't know it.
Wow.