Why didn't we pay more attention?

Ron Suskind looks back on eight years of covering the Bush administration:

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heckuva lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator." --George W. Bush, December 18, 2000

One morning in 2001, one of President Bush's most senior economic advisors walked into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. The day before, the advisor had learned that the president had decided to send out tax-rebate checks to stimulate the faltering economy. Concerned about deficits and the dubious stimulatory effect of such rebates, he had called the president's chief of staff, Andy Card, to ask for the audience, and the meeting had been set. ... He was convinced, he told Bush, that the president's position would soon enough be seen as "bad policy."

This, it seems, was the wrong thing to say to the president.

According to senior administration officials who learned of the encounter soon after it happened, President Bush looked at the man. "I don't ever want to hear you use those words in my presence again," he said.

"What words, Mr. President?"

"Bad policy," President Bush said. "If I decide to do it, by definition it's good policy. I thought you got that."

The advisor was dismissed. The meeting was over.

King George's decrees are good policy by definition the way the United States, for Bush's "base," is good and great by definition. Merits are irrelevant; what is actually done, the actual consequences, the actual course of events, are all irrelevant. We're great; whatever we do is great; if we do it, it's great. It's the politics of narcissism.

Sarah Palin is of the same mindset when it comes to critical policy thought, and speaks to the same base in the same was as Bush did about America's automatic exceptionalism. Let's not make the same mistake again.