Dawn Is Me

Today, John Dickerson wrote something in Slate that got me thinking.

Here’s what he wrote:

This president was never going to let anyone peek into his private conversations with Miers. But Bush and his advisers never thought they’d have to. They assumed that Bush’s backing Miers’ résumé (including her religious credentials) and her gender would allow the president to push her though.

If you think about it, that’s a revealing statement.

It kind of suggests to me that he believed that stuff like religious credentials and especially gender matter more to his political opponents than qualifications. After all, this reasoning goes, that must be how they got people like Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg onto the High Court in the first place. So, if it worked for those other people, though Mr. Bush, it’ll work for me.

All of which assumes that everybody else is as ideologically driven as he is and that nobody else cares about qualifications (because he doesn’t).

It takes a stunning kind of intellectual arrogance to assume that everybody thinks like you do. Because when you make that assumption, you remove any motivation to exert yourself trying to understand the thinking of your political opponents. And that makes reasoned discourse impossible because, at that point, you have to assume the reason they disagree with you must be because they’re just evil.

Which pretty much describes the American political scene of the past five years.

Really, sometimes when I think of the scope of the economic, political and societal damage that has been wrought by this one man, I do wind up thinking like him … because I can’t help concluding that he’s the anti-Christ.