And the word the Greeks had for it was hubris.

In modern terms, especially in political and governmental terms, the meaning of hubris has come to include the unbridled arrogance of power -- the elitist, egocentric, imperialistic insistence on having one's own way in all things without taking into account the facts of the matter or the feelings of others. And the actions of the Bush administration has come to embody all the worst aspects of hubristic, egocentric, unfeeling arrogance in the eyes of America and of the world.

The ancient Greeks, at least, did their best to try to keep democracy alive in a time when that was a very rare thing. However, their contemporary counterparts the Romans ending up taking the other road. The Roman emperors gradually came to define the kind of narcissistic, self-defined (and sometimes self-delusional) imperial arrogance that we still associate with the dictators of today -- and, unfortunately, there are far too many echoes of it in the White House of today as well.

It used to be that the ultimate arrogance of sovereign power in modern times was typified by two members of the dissolute Bourbon dynasty in 18th-century France: the Sun King, Louis XIV, with his infamous dictum that "L'État, c'est moi" ("I am the State"); and Marie Antoinette, the wife of his even more hubristic successor Louis XVI, with her equally infamous "Let them eat cake" attitude towards the starving peasants she ruled as queen.

George Bush's hubris and arrogance in office is well-known and widely documented, but he is hardly alone in that regard. Dick Cheney displayed the true depths of his Sun King approach to government in an interview with Good Morning America's Martha Raddatz last week in which he basically just shrugged and blew off the American people as irrelevant and annoying, as mere subjects who fail to properly acknowledge their sovereign rulers in the Bush administration.

This was the vice-president's take on the disastrous debacle in Iraq that he helped to create out of whole cloth over five years ago, as excerpted from this transcript of the interview in question:

CHENEY: I talked to most of the leaders in one-on-one sessions. And I find that the best way to be effective there is to keep it private, so that they feel they can confide in me, and I can confide in them, and we can have a conversation, and neither one of us goes out and talks about it in public. There aren't really any surprises there, it's just a matter of reemphasizing and reiterating how important it is, and they take advantage of it.

RADDATZ: And how long do you do that? There are no consequences.

CHENEY: You do it as long as you have to until you get it right. You don't quit because it's hard.

RADDATZ: So there are no consequences, it just goes on until -- as long as it lasts? You let the Iraqis go and go and go, even --

CHENEY: What if we quit two years ago or three years ago?

RADDATZ: So it could be 10 years?

CHENEY: I don't know how long it's going to take. I do know we have to get it done. And if it takes a long time, that doesn't make it any less worthwhile. ... It's hard to go into a country that has never experienced democracy and expect to be able to flip a switch and have it turn overnight. But it is turning. They do have a democracy today. They have basic --

RADDATZ: Two-thirds of Americans say it was not worth fighting.

CHENEY: They ought to go spend time, like you and I have, Martha. You know what's been happening in Iraq. You've been there as much as anybody. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation, and improvement for the better. I think even you would admit that.

RADDATZ: Let me go back to the Americans. Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.

CHENEY: So?

RADDATZ: So -- you don't care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn't had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there. ... You can't, say -- get up some morning and say, gee, the polls are critical of what we're doing, and quit. It doesn't work that way.

RADDATZ: Are you certain of victory?

CHENEY: I am.

What a striking display of advanced imperial hubris on the vice-president's part. The American people don't like our unjustified, unethical, unwinnable war in Iraq, you say? So? Who cares what they think? Too bad for them, we're the ones in charge here and we're going keep our troops over there for as long as we bloody feel like it. L'état est nous, you pesky peons, and don't you ever forget it!

Still, it is Dick Cheney that we're talking about here, after all. His grouchy, growly, stay-the-course state of denial is so familiar to most Americans by now that we pretty much expect nothing less, and certainly nothing more, from the likes of him anyhow. The problem is that he's not a rogue representative of the Bush administration's flawed strategies and failed policies in the world, merely one of its more publicly obstreperous proponents. It's a total top-down type of arrogance that seeps through at every level, from the White House on down.

So it only underscored the endemic nature of this administration's arrogance that when Dana Perino was being braced about Cheney's Sun King attitude by the legendary Helen Thomas at her White House press briefing the next morning, she offered her own "Let them eat cake" response in return:

PERINO: It's one of those days I have nothing to start with.

Q: So? (Laughter.)

PERINO: It's one of those days, I had a feeling.

[ ... ]

Q: Dana, can I just follow on our colleague Martha Raddatz's interview with the Vice President? Let's set aside the meaning of the word "so" for a second, and get to something the Vice President then said about fluctuations in the public opinion polls: "You can't be blown off course by fluctuations in public opinion polls." That would suggest that at any point in recent memory that the American public has been behind the war. It's not that there's been fluctuations in polls; it's been different degrees of opposition to the war. So is the Vice President saying it really doesn't matter what the American public thinks about the war?

PERINO: No, I don't think that's what he's saying, and obviously I haven't spoken to the Vice President since he's traveling today and was in Kabul visiting with President Karzai a the request of the President. But what he went on to say is that President should not make decisions based on polls. And we fully recognize that people across America are unhappy with the war; possibly they didn't agree with the decision in the first place. They might have been unhappy with the conduct of the war. They might have disagreed with the President's decision to send in more troops, which was a very unpopular decision across the board.

But what the President has said is that while people might not like the decisions that he makes, he has to do what he thinks is right for the country, and he cannot try to chase an opinion poll and try to make things better that way. He has to act on what he thinks is right, and that's what he's done.

Q: So at what point -- I mean, I guess I just -- there is the impression that the Vice President doesn't care about what the American people think in policy like that. Is that a wrong impression? And does the President share that impression?

PERINO: I think that is the wrong impression. I think that the Vice President and the President both, together, all of us across the administration, would like for people to support the President's decisions. We realize that that's unrealistic, especially in a time of war -- and in particular this war. And while we're not able to change public opinion, we also have to follow a principle and stand on principle. And you have to ask yourself, what kind of a person do you want in the Oval Office? And America will have this choice to make in November of 2008 -- before I get ahead of myself.

So we believe that the President stood on his principle. He hasn't chased public opinion polls. He's aware of them, but he hasn't made decisions because of them, and I think there's a distinction. Just because you don't make decisions based on opinion polls doesn't mean you don't care what people think. We are all Americans. We care deeply about what people think.

Helen?

Q: The American people are being asked to die and pay for this, and you're saying they have no say in this war?

PERINO: I didn't say that, Helen. But, Helen, this President was elected...

Q: Well, what it amounts to is you saying we have no input at all.

PERINO: You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that's the way our system is set up.

Q: Every four years.

PERINO: And we listen to --

Q: It sounds familiar.

PERINO: -- different points of view. The President, in fact, had many meetings with members of Congress leading up to his decision about the surge.

Q: Supposed to be a government for the people, of the people, by the people?

PERINO: I would submit to you that people across America, if asked what type of a President do you want: one that stands on principle or that one that chases polls? And I think that they would want --

Q: What's the principle of going to war against the people who did nothing to us?

PERINO: Helen, the President went to war to remove Saddam Hussein. He talked all about this yesterday in his speech. I'll refer you to that.

Well, apparently when it comes to the Bush administration and its loyal lock-step GOP minions in the House and Senate, it really isn't supposed to be that kind of government after all. As far as they're concerned, the only time the American people get to have any kind of input into what our country does and how it's being done is once every four years, and even then there's no guarantee that the people they pick out of a very stacked deck are going to keep any of the promises they made to get elected anyway.

Arrogance. Sheer, unbridled, imperial arrogance from the White House on down. L'état est nous. We're the sovereigns and you're our subjects. To hell with the voters. Let them eat cake. So?

Well, fortunately for us, presidents and vice-presidents do have to run for office again every four years. Representatives have to do it every two years, which makes for unending re-election campaigns but at least the bad ones can be replaced by their constituents before they can do too much damage. Senators get to go six years at a time before having to face the voters again, plus they don't have term limits either, which makes the bad ones even more difficult to dislodge than the folks in the White House are.

Difficult, that is, but not impossible. If enough of Americans decide that we are citizens, not subjects -- that's it's high time for us to take our country back from those who so clearly don't believe in listening to the will of the people -- then we can clear the roadblocks, boot out the bad Republicans, and replace them with good Democrats and get our country moving forward again.


By the way -- the level of absolute, endemic, imperial arrogance that permeates the current administration and its cronies in Congress is even more striking to watch than it is to read, as you can see for yourselves in this YouTube video from the good people at Talking Points Memo as well.