The Coronavirus

[pbrower2a]

(04-04-2020, 09:20 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-03-2020, 11:36 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: The Rachel Maddow show spent the first segment reviewing how Bush 43 appointed a horse expert as head of FEMA, said person did a hell of a job in botching Katrina, and partially as a result Bush 43 ended up on the short list of most people's worst presidents.  She went on to say that Trump is spending much more time doing much less with a much higher death count.

Odds of him ending up on the same list?

Bush lacked zealots as followers, and elections were more normal then.  Post-Katrina failure should be a near-prefect model.  I'm not sure it will be.  Trump is a bargain-basement Svengali.  Why that's true I don't know, but it is.  Biden, on the other hand, is about as exciting as oatmeal.  This might actually play 180 degrees out from the model.

The worst leaders have their followers ... evil or gullible. They are good at appealing to the worst in human nature -- greed, cruelty, bigotry, envy, resentment, superstition... and in return they get adulation from people that honest leaders find difficult, if not impossible, to serve. We are better off with bland and boring. Politics is not the right place to go for excitement; leave that to the theater, the concert hall, and the stadium! 

Good leaders try to foster the best in people because such is where one gets genuine and unqualified progress. Good leaders recognize that people aren't going to get out of the government what someone else or they themselves didn't put in. Good leaders know enough to rely upon work, enterprise, learning, and skill development, upon imagination as a means of taking dares with tradition as a safe fallback. Bad ones find pariahs to blame for all that goes wrong, and all too often that means the competent and provident that bad leaders suggest are exploiters.