GREAT column at
The Hill about Bush's almost total lack of moral courage.
LINK - We have a more immediate sense of what physical bravery and cowardice are. In fact, when we speak of bravery and cowardice, the physical variety is almost always what we're talking about. It's whether or not you can charge an enemy position while you're being fired at. It's whether you're immobilized by the fear of death.
Moral cowardice is more complex. A moral coward is someone who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do, to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of your misdeeds.
On the balance sheet of moral bravery - as opposed to physical bravery - John Kerry and George W. Bush were about as far apart as you could be on Vietnam. On the one hand, you have Kerry, who already had doubts about whether we should be fighting in Vietnam before he went but put his life on the line anyway. On the other hand, you have Bush, who supported the war, which means he believed the goal was worth the cost in American lives. Only, not his life. He believed others should go, just not him.
That is almost the definition of moral cowardice.
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The stubborn refusal ever to change course, which the president tries to pass off as a sign of leadership or devotion to principle, is actually an example of his cowardice.
For the same reasons, he runs from soldiers' funerals as if they were burying victims of the plague - because it's the easy way out. If there's a problem, he denies it or finds someone else to take the fall for him.
Everyone has these tendencies in their measure. No one is perfect. But they define Bush.
The same sort of moral cowardice that led him to support the Vietnam War but decide it wasn't for him, run companies into the ground and let others pay the bill, play gutter politics but run for the hills when someone asked him to say it to their face - those are the same qualities that led the president to lie the country into war, to fail to prepare for the aftermath and then to refuse to take responsibility for any of it when the bill started to come due.
