People who hate George W. Bush often make the mistake of thinking he is stupid.
I have argued here that he is, in fact, trapped in time. He has lived and internalized the assumptions of the Nixon Thesis to such an extent that he can't see any other path. So he just goes forward, even after his most ardent supporters have turned the other way.
Easy to ridicule. But Bush lives inside a political world, and that I assert is why he has such tunnel vision. Those who are successful in other realms do much the same thing.
Take TV and cable networks. CBS posts its videos on YouTube, but demands that users who post the same videos take them down. Why? Tunnel vision. They are agents for the producers of TV shows. The exclusive agent. They can't conceive of an "economics of abundance" where the key to getting an audience is through endorsements, Google Love. When a dozen or 100 people go to the trouble of posting the same Jon Stewart Video on YouTube, this grows CBS' online audience far more than CBS posting the same videos on every video Web site would, because of the endorsement value.
Back in Washington, bloggers are constantly amazed at how paid pundits will ignore their own prior writings and self-righteously condemn anyone who comes to town with new ideas. No responsibility is accepted for having enabled stupidity. As Josh Marshall notes, "This is noxious, risible, fetid thinking. But there it is. That's the story they want to tell. The whole place is rotten down to the very core."
My point is that it's not rotten, it's human, it's a tunnel vision world.
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