First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. –Mohandas Gandhi

Ran into that quote this morning. It picked me up.

On to the news: Righties were prompted by the WaPo article on the “angry left” to spend much of the weekend congratulating themselves on how un-angry they are compared to those unhinged lefties. Yes, they’re deluded. I know. But that’s why I had to laugh at a headline in today’s WaPo:

“Anger at Bush May Hurt GOP At Polls”

Oopsie!

In the article, Charles Babington writes,

Intense and widespread opposition to President Bush is likely to be a sharp spur driving voters to the polls in this fall’s midterm elections, according to strategists in both parties, a phenomenon that could give Democrats a turnout advantage over Republicans for the first time in recent years.

Polls have reflected voter discontent with Bush for many months, but as the election nears, operatives are paying special attention to one subset of the numbers. It is the wide disparity between the number of people who are passionate in their dislike of Bush vs. those who support him with equal fervor.

Remember when we had a 50-50 nation? Now it’s more like 60-40. In our favor. And according to Babington, the ranks of the genuinely passionate are even more unequal —

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 47 percent of voters “strongly” disapprove of Bush’s job performance, vs. 20 percent who said they “strongly approve.”

The GOP is getting nervous.

“Angry voters turn out and vote their anger,” said Glen Bolger, a pollster for several Republican congressional candidates. “Democrats will have an easier time of getting out their vote because of their intense disapproval of the president. That means we Republicans are going to have to bring our ‘A’ turnout game in November.”

Anger is a tricky thing. It can motivate people, but it can also repel. I wrote last week, for example, that antiwar protests are more effective when protesters are serious but not angry. That’s because people who are not angry at the same things you are will be uncomfortable with your anger. If you want to persuade people to see your point of view, it helps to do it in a not-angry way.

Blogging, on the other hand, is not about persuasion as much as it is about peeling away layers of socially conditioned bullshit to get at bare-bones truth. A good blogger is an honest blogger. I’d say to any blogger that if you’re angry, dig into yourself to find the source of your anger and blog it. Don’t worry about what the neighbors will think.

Saturday I quoted Sam Keen;

Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

This is exactly what fuels much of the “angry” Left Blogosphere. Anger motivated a whole lot of leftie bloggers to start blogging. Collectively, these past few years, we’ve been sifting through the mud to achieve clarity, to understand the lunatic impulses that sent our nation down a self-destructive path. Through blogging we inform each other, we focus, we prioritize, and we organize. But we’re not a bleeping public relations service. If you’re uncomfortable with our anger, go somewhere else.

Another interesting thing about anger is that it’s often in the eyes of beholders. How many times have you read about how “angry” Hillary Clinton is? Now, think about it — have you ever seen her be really angry? I have not. I don’t know the lady personally — maybe she is angry — but in public appearances she’s never struck me as being all that angry. At most, I seen her annoyed, or maybe mildly alarmed, but I can’t say I’ve seen her angry.

Awhile back I read a social psychology paper that measured people’s attitudes toward displays of anger. One interesting finding was that many people approved of anger coming from men — angry men were perceived as being “strong” — but were offended by anger coming from women. Angry men are strong, but angry women are bitchy.

Thus, Republicans loved Zell Miller’s foaming-at-the-mouth performance at the Republican National Convention, but when Hillary Clinton disagrees with some conservative policy she’s out of control. (Ambition inspires a similar dichotomy — it’s a virtue in a man but a vice in a woman. But that’s another rant.)

I infer from this that anger is one thing coming from the powerful but something else entirely coming from the powerless. Anger in defense of the status quo may be more acceptable socially than anger at the status quo. Over the years I’ve observed that when neutral (or uninformed) people are exposed to two opposing angry factions, most of the time they are more sympathetic to whichever side represents the Establishment. I know we like to say we cheer for the underdog, but that’s only when the underdog doesn’t growl.

I admit this rightie has a point — it’s not psychologically healthy to be angry all the time. However, repressing anger isn’t good mental health hygiene, either. In our culture women in particular tend to suppress anger (wonder why?). I’ve done it myself in the distant past. We’ll go along, denying our own anger, putting up with slights and indignities, telling ourselves that I shouldn’t be angry or even I should be more understanding, and all along that anger is buried deep inside, festering and malignant. Until one day the dam breaks, and it all spills out. And then you realize it was there all along.

The wrathful dakini is a common figure in Tibetan Buddhist iconography. Dakinis are female archetypes representing the energies of enlightenment. Meditation on the image of a wrathful dakini helps the meditator get in touch with his own anger. Only until anger is fully realized and honestly acknowledged can it be released, and then the passions of anger can be transformed into a positive energy.

Conclusion: Anger by itself is neither good nor bad; it’s what you do with it that matters.

Lacking a smooth transition here, let’s swoop back from the spiritual realm to politics. Will voter anger finally turn the tide against the VRWC? DemFromCT has this observation:

Americans are at the ‘tune out/go away’ phase with Bush. He’s a reminder of that painful mistake at the voting booth… the one that makes Bush voters ‘not interested in politics anymore’ when you talk to them. Denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. They are somewhere between depressed and accepting of his incompetence. keep that in mind when you talk to them, and don’t rub their faces in it. Just give them an alternative.

I agree; the enormous majority of Americans don’t want to hear about Bush any more. They don’t care what he says. They don’t care what he thinks. He can trot around the Rose Garden and declare he supports Donald Rumsfeld and we’re winning in Iraq and Health Savings Accounts are just peachy all he likes; hardly anyone is listening. He has become irrelevant.

This by itself is not going to turn the House and Senate over to Dems in November, but surely it will help.

And let me say that I’d rather see an angry electorate than a complacent electorate. Angry people care.

The Gray Lady started an editorial cat fight with WaPo, says Editor & Publisher.

It’s war. No, not Sunni vs. Shia in Iraq, but The New York Times editorial page vs. its Washington Post counterpart.

Perhaps it’s all in good fun, but it was startling to find a Times’ editorial on Sunday titled “The Bad Leak” exactly one week after a controversial Post editorial called “A Good Leak.” The leak—involving former White House aide“Scooter” Libby—was the same, but the point of view about 180 degrees different.

Just a week ago, the hawkish Post had defended Libby’s leak of intelligence information to reporters as being in the public interest; Ambassador Joseph Wilson had it coming; President Bush had good reason to think Iraq tried to get uranium in Niger a few years ago; and now the president’s critics were unfairly criticizing him for the leak, among other things.

In a bit of embarrassment, the Post, on the very day the editorial appeared, had pretty much proved in its news pages that the leak was really meant to punish Wilson, and most of the information in the leak was obviously, and knowingly, false.

Now comes the Times editorial—siding with the Post news team against its editorial page.

From “A Bad Leak“:

President Bush says he declassified portions of the prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq because he “wanted people to see the truth” about Iraq’s weapons programs and to understand why he kept accusing Saddam Hussein of stockpiling weapons that turned out not to exist. This would be a noble sentiment if it actually bore any relationship to Mr. Bush’s actions in this case, or his overall record.

Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq — in any accepted sense of that word — when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later.

And this president has never shown the slightest interest in disclosure, except when it suits his political purposes. He has run one of the most secretive administrations in American history, consistently withholding information and vital documents not just from the public, but also from Congress. Just the other day, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the House Judiciary Committee that the names of the lawyers who reviewed Mr. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program were a state secret.

The Kool-Aiders are sticking to the “if the President does it, it’s OK” defense, utterly ignoring the bare-assed context of this particular leak — that the President used classified documents for selfish purposes, as if an intelligence assessment were nothing but a useful gimmick for political advantage that happened to be at his personal and privileged disposal.

Since Mr. Bush regularly denounces leakers, the White House has made much of the notion that he did not leak classified information, he declassified it. This explanation strains credulity. Even a president cannot wave a wand and announce that an intelligence report is declassified.

Even more, it strains credulity that a document was actually “declassified” if the White House kept the full document hidden and the “declassification” secret — even from the CIA — until it became politically expedient to announce it. As John Dean wrote, “The secrecy surely suggests cover-up.”

And it surely suggests misuse of the powers of office for personal advantage, which according to some constitutional scholars is the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

What Steve Soto says. Also what this guy says in the Newark Star-Ledger (via Dr. Atrios) — “They should never again be allowed anywhere near the instruments and agencies of the American government.” — ain’t it the truth?

It would have worked out if we’d just stayed the course, the chief executive said. Everything would have been fine if people had had more faith. We failed because we were attacked by people who wanted us to fail.

Bush in Iraq? No, Jeffrey K. Skilling in court.

The former Enron CEO, on trial for multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud, told the court yesterday that Enron’s slide into bankruptcy was caused by a loss of faith. Thomas Mulligan writes for the Los Angeles Times,

The defense contends that Enron was in great shape in the fall of 2001 but its slide into bankruptcy was caused by a sudden loss of faith by creditors, akin to a run on a bank. The creditors, according to the defense, were spooked by erroneous media coverage stirred up by short sellers — stock-market players who try to profit by betting that companies’ shares will fall. …

… “I am devastated because the company was brought to its knees unnecessarily,” Skilling said Thursday.

Enron got caught using, um, creative accounting practices to hide losses and make some parts of the company look profitable when, in fact, they were not.

Several prosecution witnesses, including the one-time heads of the broadband and retail energy units, previously testified that by the spring of 2001, those businesses were dead in the water. They said Enron officials tried desperately to cover up the units’ woes because they were a big part of the “growth story” the company was selling to Wall Street.

But maybe Skilling is right. Maybe, had Enron not been caught, those units someday would have begun making a profit. And then everyone would have made money and lived happily ever after.

And maybe Iraq will settle down and start being a good little nation any day now. All we have to do is stay the course.

Are we seeing a pattern here? I believe we are.

Awhile back the nation was seized with a cultlike admiration for celebrity CEOs. William Greider wrote in The Nation (July 2002):

The cult of the CEO (as some business gurus now call it) promoted a celebration of testosterone and greed that has coarsened the culture and damaged economic life in severe ways. The adoration of corporate executives–those with a tough-guy disregard for their employees and social norms–seems to be receding now, along with stock prices and disappearing profits, but it does resemble a utopian cult, in which the followers obsessively worship a few strong guys said to possess superhuman qualities.

Not everyone was taken in. In my experience the worker bees in the office cubicle hives were more likely to wonder if the guys in the penthouse office suites had any brains at all; hence the popularity of Dilbert.

If you’ve been around for awhile you’ve probably noticed that CEOs tend to come up through the ranks of sales and marketing departments, or maybe corporate finance. Or maybe, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, they move back and forth between plum government jobs and CEO positions without much in the way of hands-on, private-sector business experience at all.

Once I read about a CEO who had actually worked his way up through engineering, which the article writer acknowledged was practically unheard of. I have seen a few product development people move up pretty far. But if you’re in production or manufacturing, fuhgeddaboudit.

In other words, the more your job involves producing a tangible product, the less likely it is you’ll ever be a CEO.

CEOs tend to be salesmen. And above all else, they exceed in selling themselves. That’s how they get where they get. Although I take it on faith they aren’t all incompetent, this 2002 article in Harvard magazine by Craig Lambert documents a number of horror stories of CEO blunders. He also argues that the CEO Cult was largely a cult of personality; star CEOs have charisma. And charisma, among other things, is impervious to rationality. Here Lambert quotes Rakesh Khurana, a Harvard PhD and author of Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs, which explores the messianic appeal of charismatic chief executives.

The trend toward charisma may have started when “the idea took root that if a firm was doing poorly or well, it was because of the CEO,” Khurana explains. “Previously, CEOs were about as well-known as their chauffeurs. But something happened when Lee Iacocca was credited with single-handedly saving an American icon. Most people forgot about the $2-billion federally guaranteed loan to bail out Chrysler, or the United Auto Workers’ givebacks. Iacocca made other CEOs look bland–there was even talk of drafting him for president. The image of a CEO changed from being a capable administrator to a leader–a motivating, flamboyant leader with a new task. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, business tried to redefine itself; it was no longer about the profane task of making money, but concerned with vision, values, mission—essentially religious terms.”

This meant “importing the sacred into the profane,” explains Khurana, who uses the German sociologist Max Weber’s works on charisma as a touchstone. Charismatic leadership, which grows from a personal magnetism that inspires devotion, reaches its apotheosis in religious cults. Its ascendance in corporate life is “a throwback to an earlier form of authority that proved to be very unstable,” says Khurana. “Weber said that charisma and rationality cannot coexist. The progress of Western civilization has been a movement away from charismatic leadership toward rational authority invested in laws and institutions. After Hitler and Mussolini, Americans were rightly skeptical of charismatic leaders. Separating the individual from the office is one of the great victories of Western society.”

Over the years I’ve observed that groups will defer to members who are sure of themselves. Most of us have fears and doubts about our abilities and decisions; it can be a relief to let the guy with no fears and doubts make the decisions. And once the leader-follower relationship is established, it’s very hard to break even after the leader screws up and the followers have lost faith. If you’ve been around the block a few times you’ve probably seen this yourself.

For that reason, self-confidence trumps knowledge and competence nearly every time. An absolute faith in his own correctness will propel a man’s career a very long way. And once a guy has a reputation for gravitas and competence he has to screw up big time before those around him get a clue he may really be a fool — or, in current office parlance, “a real Dick Cheney.”

I’ve been speaking of the CEO cult in past tense, which isn’t entirely correct. I’m sure there are a lot of real Dick Cheneys still running companies. And the cult lingers on in the Bush Administration.

Ellen Goodman writes in today’s Boston Globe,

After manipulating this faucet of fear, the president then defended the war in the name of national security, casting himself as the country’s father-protector. In short, he sold himself as the person we needed to protect us from the fear he provoked. Welcome to the protection racket. And lest you forget, his reelection campaign was run by the same racketeers. George W. was transformed from a conservative who was compassionate to a commander in chief who was unflappable. John Kerry was accused of the unmanly crime of nuance and caricatured as flip-floppable. We were subjected to an endless strongman debate with Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the attack on ”girlie men.” …

… There’s something to be learned in the Bush debacle. Beware the call of the old manliness. Beware the man who ramps up the danger and offers himself as hero and security blanket. And beware the leader whose unwavering, unflappable, unnuanced, and unjustified confidence in the face of risk becomes our disaster.

In her column, Goodman argues that the same overconfident, risk-taking, hypermasculine behaviors that we look for in our leaders are the same attributes that our enemies look for in their leaders. Our he-men demand that we look to them for protection from their he-men. Testosterone creates a self-perpetuating protection racket.

Manliness is defined by Harvey Mansfield as ”confidence in the face of risk.” I was reminded of a book I read years ago — sorry I can’t remember the title — in which the author defended obscenely high salaries for CEOs (which are even more obscene now) because CEOs take risks. His examples of lower-paid jobs that didn’t involve “risk” included firemen and policemen. I kid you not. Some of these guys really are living in their own fantasy world in which they’re the superheros.

They’re confident in the face of risk not because they’re brave, but because they’re bleeping delusional.

Let’s go now to Bob Burnett, who posted “George Bush — Failed Christian, Failed CEO” at Huffington Post.

Dubya’s carefully crafted image as America’s “CEO President” ignores the reality that he has consistently been a failure as an executive. He’s made dreadful mistake after mistake, but never learns from any of them. As an oilman, baseball executive, governor, and now as President, George Bush has been a figurehead executive, the public face of an enterprise where the real power lay somewhere else. His oil businesses were notable disasters, although he never suffered financially, as friends of the Bush family bailed him out. Because George W was buffered from reality throughout his adult life, he never had to come to grips with his failures. The lessons he didn’t learn are painfully evident in the occupation of Iraq, where Bush has committed each of the classic CEO mistakes and hasn’t recognized any of them.

Among these mistakes was invading Iraq with no plan for occupation. Further,

When their projects go disastrously off-course, CEOs find it difficult to pull the plug. Typically, they plead for more time; insist that they see the light at the end of the tunnel. President Bush claims, “The progress in the past year has been significant — and we have a clear path forward.” Beleaguered CEOS argue that to even talk of shutting down a project demoralizes those working on it. President Bush maintains, “It would send the wrong message to our troops — who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission they are risking their lives to achieve.”

And Enron’s floundering divisions would have turned a profit eventually, and then everything would have been just fine.

The entity we call the “Bush Administration” is a perfect storm of CEO cultism; a near-pure distillation of chest-thumping, risk-taking, steely-eyed, self-deluded arrogance; a collection of losers who couldn’t lose, who bluffed and bullied their way to the top and who now are trying to bluff and bully their way out of the disasters they’ve created through sheer joy-ride recklessness.

Until very recently I haven’t given serious thought to whether Bush would finish his second term, but now so many chickens are coming home to roost — and they’re big, mean, ugly motherbleeping chickens — I am giving it serious thought. Outside of Washington the pool of Bush Bitter Enders is shrinking fast. Most people aren’t even listening to Bush any more. Yet we face massive problems, not all of Bush’s making, that will take more than banners and bluster to manage.

We’re on a trajectory now that, I think, could result in Bush’s (and Cheney’s) impeachment or forced resignation before 2008. That trajectory depends in part on events outside of anyone’s control, so it could change. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, retired generals have finally worked up the courage to take on Donald Rumsfeld:

Retired Major Gen. John Riggs told National Public Radio that Rumsfeld had helped create an atmosphere of “arrogance” among the Pentagon’s top civilian leadership.

“They only need the military advice when it satisfies their agenda. I think that’s a mistake, and that’s why I think he should resign,” Riggs said.

Advice? Manly men don’t take advice. If you have absolute faith in your own judgments, why would you take advice? If we just give it more time, we’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel, and then everyone will know that Rummy and Dick and George were right, after all. And they have no doubts they were right.

And maybe William Bennett would’ve made up his $8 million in gambling losses if he’d had one more weekend in the casinos. Ya never know.

Update: See also Paul Krugman, “Weapons of Math Destruction.“

There are a couple of good articles on Salon (and also at True Blue Liberal) that I don’t have time to comment on, but they’re good reads. I’ll give both links for each article.

Fritz Umbach, “Bush’s Bogus Document Dump” — Salon Link — TBL Link

Sidney Blumenthal, “The Slow-Motion Trap” — Salon Link — TBL Link

Update: See also “Another General Calls For Rumsfeld’s Resignation” at Think Progress. This is genuinely extraordinary, for reasons modus potus explains here. But I have it on good authority that the brass has hated Rummy from the get-go.