From A Master

The esteemed E.L. Doctorow on Bush:

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-Day in 1944, Gen. Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was.

Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find.

You see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt-sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion that he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it.[...]

This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing - to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.

A war will do that as well as anything. You become a "wartime leader." The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.

He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the millions more who cannot afford health insurance.

He does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he tried to deprive of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it....

Go read.