Thinking Inside the Bubble: Laura Bush & George McClellan

There simply is no possibility that any Bush, apparently, will ever voluntarily relinguish the saving graces of living in a bubble no matter how much reality intrudes or how often the bubble is assaulted by facts. Leave us take for a moment Laura Bush's response in an interview when she was asked about the infamous shoe-throwing incident.

[S]he said the incident reflects change in Iraq.

"As bad as the incident is, in my view, it is a sign that Iraqis feel a lot freer to express themselves," she said.

Uh-huh. There's always a positive spin you can put on everything. Sure the insurrection and IED's are dangerous and people get hurt but on the other hand the Iraqis are feeling free to express themselves through explosives. There aren't many outside the Bush Bubble who would be likely to defend it in quite that way, but it's typical of Bubble Thinking.

Bubble Thinking is a particular mental process that's required first in order to construct a Bubble to begin with and then to maintain it in the face of numerous reality challenges. Clearly Mrs Bush has mastered this difficult art. So has Condi Rice who recently explained that the Bush presidency was a success if you look at its fight against corruption.

I heard your jaw hit the floor. Calm down. She's talking about foreign corruption.

"I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he's done. This generation will," [the Fabulous Condi] said.

"Because I think the fact that we have really made foreign assistance not just an issue of giving humanitarian aid or giving money to poor people, but really insisting on good governance and fighting corruption."

In these two statements you have the core of what it takes to build a Bubble and defend it from all comers: Denial, Rigid Ideology, Absolute Optimism, and a talent for Invention. If one of these four is lacking, the Bubble either cannot be constructed or it cannot survive Realism.

CIP: In 1862, Gen McClellan could have crushed Lee's Confederates at least twice. But McClellan was a Southern sympathizer who had no wish to destroy the "rebellion". So instead he created a Bubble and insisted on living inside it for long enough to allow Lee to rebuild his forces and for the South itself to organize and maximize its resources. He did this by:

1. Denial: He couldn't move toward Lee because his army "wasn't ready" and anyway Lee wasn't in striking distance. He knew the second wasn't true, and though he may genuinely have believed the first it's hard to imagine why since they had been training for nearly 6 straight months.

2. Rigid Ideology: McClellan believed the War was NOT about slavery (It wasn't it wasn't it wasn't) and if he crushed Lee it would be disaster for the Union because the South would never forgive the North for "imposing its will" on them. The War, he wrote to Lincoln on more than one occasion, must never be allowed to become a war to abolish slavery and the South must never be beaten in a way that left them no choice but to abolish slavery.

3. Absolute Optimism: Even as Lee and Stonewall Jackson were on the verge of destroying McClellan's army at Antietam, McClellan was writing to Lincoln and Stanton that Lee was beaten and he was preparing to move out to the offensive.

4. A Talent for Invention: Lee had, at best, 50,000 troops available to him when he challenged McClellan's Army of over 100,000. McClellan, on the basis of nothing but fear, apparently, decided that Lee had 200,000 and stuck to his belief despite all indications and reports to the contrary. He dunned Lincoln and Stanton for another 100,000 men and insisted he could do nothing until he got them.

Laura's Bubble Blindness is not, as we can see, unique. It is a habit with conservatives and has been since McClellan if not before. Thinking inside the constrictions of the Bubble requires inflexible ideological denial mixed with extraordinarily elastic and endlessly flexible optimistic invention which is believed instantly and without question as a rigid orthodoxy.

To return to the Civil War for a moment, the South was doomed to lose from the very beginning, not because slavery's days were over - which they were - or because the North was so advanced industrially - which they were - but because the South's reason for starting it, "State's Rights", would not allow them to give enough power to a central government to prosecute a successful war. Jefferson Davis had to beg individual governors for contributions of men, money, and supplies and was more often than not turned down. When he was, there was no way to compel the states to cough up and no place else to get what he needed. It wasn't the North that starved the South's armies from Day One, it was the South's own ideology and lack of flexibility.

In Laura's and Condi's determination to see nothing but what they want to see, for personal and ideological reasons, and their innate, ingrained ability to invent what they want to be true and then talk themselves into believing it is true, we can see that conservatives have learned NOTHING in the last 136 years. It is reasonable to infer feom this that they will most likely learn nothing in the next 136, either.

And so it goes.