Get Your George Bush Action Figure Today

Over at Ocinus, David Neiwert gives us a picture of George Bush as action hero president. He points out that Bush is tapping into a culture conditioned to respect the outsider hero, who doesn't bother with the red tape of legality or Constitutionality, but instead shoots down the bad guy without recourse to due process or any of those wimpy liberal values.

The action hero model finds it better to kill a dozen innocent men than allow one guilty one to go unpunished.

"It's too easy to say that George W. Bush and his cult of defenders on the right have watched too many of these action films. Rather, what is more noteworthy is that this public response taps directly into those well-established sentiments about heroic action. It's actually rather a brilliant stroke: Republicans are appealing to an American public already profoundly propagandized by a steady diet of Hollywood-produced action flicks and revenge melodramas. Movies in which such niceties as civil rights are readily discarded in the pursuit of justice."

Revenge as a government policy might satisfy some, but it is hard to fathom that the government of the United States would create policy based on revenge instead of policy based on the best interests of the American people.

"These "annoying" laws exist for a reason fundamental to the very foundations of modern society: This is a nation of laws, not men. And while it's easy and convenient to discard those principles in the flimsy context of a movie, doing so in real life has profound and lasting complications.

I think what you can say is that the Bush team is cynically manipulating public sentiment for the sake of pushing the limits of presidential power. It's a brilliant move, really, tapping into an aspect of the psyche that has been preconditioned by a hoary myth that has been perpetuated over the years by Hollywood: the notion that the action-driven hero's instincts for "saving lives" are superior to careful reasoning and principled restraint."

What is truly remarkable is that so many American are willing to give up the rights that millions have died to preserve based on the actions of a President and political party that hold those very rights in contempt.