Emboldened, embedded, embittered

A headline in the NYTimes this morning reads: President Feels Emboldened, Not Accidental, After Victory.

Depending on your fate, you could wake up on this Monday morning and find yourself in a state of one of the three E’s.

If I were to do a documentary-type film of this morning, I would have a three-way montage. In the first frame, there would have to be a CNN-type clip from Iraq with the word Embedded underneath, followed by the words (from CNN.com) “thousands of U.S. Marines and Iraqi soldiers braced for all-out urban combat;” then in the second, we’d see a refreshed, smiling, raring-to-go image of GWB with the NYT reference to his “Emboldened” state of mind and their words: “re-election has already had a powerful effect on his psyche, his friends and advisers say;” followed, finally, by a clip of me (hey, it’s my film, for my own archives), tossing aside yesterday’s Week in Review with the tables that break down who voted in what way on November 2nd. I’d just stay with the “Embittered” label underneath the last frame.

I’d leave Kerry out of my film. Bad enough that anyone can now park in front of his house (yesterday it was reported that the minute he lost the election, he lost also the security detail that kept his street clear of unwelcome loiterers), he shouldn’t have to also suffer the indignity of being in my short film.

I’d end the documentary (it would only be about ten seconds long because I have only that much energy for it) with a flash to the text of the NYTimes, this time to the passage that picks up on my posted hubris contest from the other day (a not-so-impartial panel of judges decided that the winning entry may well be “megalomaniac”):

"The big danger is one of hubris," said David R. Gergen, a professor of public service at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a veteran of the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton White Houses. "There's a tendency after you win your second term to think you're invulnerable. You're not just king of the mountain, you've mastered the mountain. That can often lead to mistakes of excessive pride."