In many ways, those who think that George Bush personally or the Bush movement generally can be quickly and easily explained away with trite slogans and all-encompassing cartoon theories ("he's evil and there is nothing else to say" or "the whole thing is a grand plan to enrich his corporate cronies and that is all there is to it") are driven by the same temptations. The need to find some simplistic, overarching theory to explain the whole world is powerful and universal, but such simplicity is rarely accurate.This is why I don't go in for any kind of conspiracy theories with regard to history. On the one hand it boils things down to a single cause, which is never the case, and on the other hand it demands a level of competence and secrecy which human beings are just not capable of achieving.
I don't believe that the president is evil, but I do believe that he and I have incompatible belief systems. I also don't believe that anything that has happened in Iraq serves a hidden agenda; it's basic mismanagement. He misunderstands every situation because his binary approach to the world (good v. evil) doesn't allow for complexity.
As a side note, it is human nature to assume other people's biases and beliefs are motivated by secondary desires ("he's just saying that to win votes" or "he's just doing things to help the rich"), while we consider our own biases and beliefs to be pure and untainted. We believe something because it's true, they believe something because it serves their purposes.
But in human psychology, our motivations and desires are always fluid and changing. It's our fixed attitudes and biases that form our belief system, and in western culture we tend to believe that these things are not flexible or subject to change. Justice. Truth. Democracy. For us, these are Platonic ideals, transcendent and immutable absolutes. For Bush, Good and Evil are also universal, and not subject to change or discussion. The problem with this is that these sorts of locked ideas and biases can, at times, cause us to make the same mistakes over and over again. For Bush it is not his motivations that are the problem but his binary thought processes. These sorts of biases are very difficult for a person to change. These sorts of worldview level beliefs are locked deep in the psyche and require generational change that is beyond the individual. As the saying goes, a leopard cannot change its spots, but you can get a new leopard.
In the end, Bush's motivations, his sincerity, are beside the point. It is his core values and beliefs that are incompatible with and insufficient for his role as president in a time of crisis. He can't abandon his Capitalist Christianist views, and therefore the U.S. desperately needs to find a new leopard in 2008.
