Indulge me, as this has bearing. As a waitress, after long bitter experience I found that the only sure way to deal with rude, asshole customers was to be as sweet as pie to them. It accomplished many things. It made them feel like the chumps they were, especially when they left without leaving a tip, which they inevitably did -- their shame was too profound to dare leave a dime. It made observers more sympathetic to my plight. It gave me more strength and self-respect than had resulted times before when I succumbed to justifiable and righteous anger. It was also just plain fun to see the powerless rage in the assholes when they saw that I would only respond with smiles and contrition and politeness.
An ignorant or short-sighted observer would perhaps have lamented that I was pandering to the rude customers out of fear of losing a tip or generating a complaint to my boss.
But in truth, the boss probably would have backed me up and kicked the people out had I snapped, and either way, sympathetic customers who witnessed what I had to put up with would usually compensate generously for any lost tips by over-tipping themselves.
Most important, and what made me so certain that "respecting" their bad ways was so correct, was the fact that they dared not look me or anyone else in the eye by the time their meal was through. They knew they were the chumps, so did everyone else -- and I hadn't said a single nasty word. They had no excuse, no foundation for offense. I learned a lot from rude customers.
You choose the words "fear" and "pandering" to describe Dubya's motives and actions. I know better.