There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
I swore to myself if I could think of two nice things to say about George W. Bush, I would have to write a diary about it. My lucky day has come.
My standard “if you can’t say something nice about someone then don’t say anything at all” phrase about the man is, “I may not support torture or treason, but at least Bush kept a beehive on the lawn of the Governor’s Mansion when he was king of Texas.”
And its true, to his credit W did keep a beehive on the lawn, or at least he allowed one to be kept there. It was removed once Rick Perry and his coif were sworn in: according to the Texas DPS folks I asked one day, “Someone musta got stung.”
On to number two.
Although the man is a liar, distasteful to see and hear, and clearly in well over his head in everything he does, he does make the most forceful argument for reading Hannah Arendt I’ve heard in a long time.
Here are a few quotes to get us started:
The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
In summary, somebody please_________ this __________ before we all _________.