brainrow

A few years ago I was being shown around some of the ritzier neighborhoods of Los Angeles. I saw a fancy sports car just ahead of us, with a vanity license plate that said, “MENSCH.”

“I know one thing about the guy in that car,” I said. “He’s no mensch.”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman writes about the mensch gap:

“Be a mensch,” my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren’t mensches.

Dick Cheney isn’t a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney’s recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn’t a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion’s aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about “unknown unknowns” and going to war with “the army you have…”

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn’t a mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of New Orleans?…

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn’t a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan’s catastrophic start doesn’t reflect poorly on his department, that “no logical person” would have expected “a transition happening that is so large without some problems.” In fact, Medicare’s 1966 startup went very smoothly.…

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault.

…

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders’ character, it has horrifying consequences. You can’t learn from mistakes if you won’t admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years — the failed occupation of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

During the campaign of 2004, I heard people complain that John Kerry was too smart; that he knew foreign languages; that he had traveled to many countries. One person said, “He thinks he’s better than us.”

Bush doesn’t?

Kerry showed he had the intellect for the job, and some Americans saw a threat to the idea that “all men are created equal,” I guess.

Personally, I want somebody way smarter than me as president, but many American voters seem uncomfortable with a president who’s too smart, so we get the fake down-home Texas boy, George W. Bush, and his team of Washington Blame-Dodgers.

Oy vey.