Not Your Sweetie

More James Caroll:
But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he
reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else.
When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a
bottomless void.

To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring
`em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such
authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to
such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own
soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness.

No human being with a minimal self-knowledge could speak of evil as he does, but there is no
self-knowledge without a self. Even this short ''distance of history'' shows George W. Bush to be,
in that sense, the selfless president, which is not a compliment. It's a warning.