>Which illustrates the point that what matters is not moral/intellectual
>qualities of politicians, but the quality of political institutions.
Kind of hard to separate the two, isn't it? A system in which a cretin like W can rise to the top is one permeated by bad institutions - prep schools and prestige universities that reproduce inherited privilege, secret societies that reinforce networks and cultivate ruthless entitlement, political parties that do little but represent competiting elite interest groups, a system of media and political discourse that's overheated and moronic, etc.
And this gang scares me more than the earlier ones. Bush 41 was mild in comparison, and even Reagan didn't scare me as much. Call me naive but I never bought the rhetoric of the nuclear freeze movement, that RR risked plunging us into nuclear war. No doubt the Reagan buildup contributed to the end of the USSR, which was a bad thing on balance I think. But he & his admin never scared me as much as 43's gang, which sometimes looks like it will plunge us into some kind of catastrophe, maybe a generalization of the conditions of Israel & the Occupied Territories to much of the rest of the world.
Doug