President What's Next?

If we're going to attack Bush for being childish, not knowing the diplomatic protocol for a pee break is really the least of our worries (incidentally, Bush should've just asked me, as, according to Google, I am the authority on all things bladder-related). I'd be much more concerned with the apparent merging of his ADD and Great Man of History pretensions.

When I was kid, I figured life must be episodic, and if I could just land a job as a hero, I could do something stupendous every week! But, as it turned out, doing great things takes lots of work, meticulous planning, and a fair amount of drudgery. You can't save the world in 30 minutes, rest at the ranch for a fortnight, and return, next Tuesday, for a new installment of My Fantastically Exciting Life. Remaking the world requires you to stay up late.

With Iraq decidedly unsaved, Bush now knows that. But if this is right, it may not matter. What worries me is that he's already extracted his Manichean satisfaction from that confrontation and, now bored by its inexorable descent into sectarian division, is willing to leave the Iraq cliffhanger floating and move onto the next cosmic clash. Little could be more dangerous. One of the requirements for holding the modern American presidency should be the possession of a serious attention span. If you want to engage in the sort of global remodeling that Bush does, it needs to be near inhuman -- they should be able to synthesize Ritalin from your nail clippings. That George seems more interested in knocking down the blocks rather than slowly, carefully, putting them back together is quite scary. That he seems ready to play Godzilla on another set is downright terrifying.