Toronto Mike

My Final Words About Dubya

USA

George Dubya Bush has 14 days left in office.  A recent poll found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House.  This will be my very last entry about Dubya, a man I won't even miss as blog fodder.

Throughout the past eight years, I wrote about him often.

With only a couple of weeks left, I'm looking forward to never writing about him again.  Besides, this op-ed column in the New York Times by Frank Rich called "A President Forgotten but Not Gone" says it all so perfectly.

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large  enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians  like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even  the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a  memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom  Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s  the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House.  He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to  pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from  the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the  heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive  stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and  the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute  it.
The one indisputable talent of his White House was its  ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press.  Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last  photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On  Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in  the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a  farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security,  Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.
He  tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s  program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free  society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his  “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a  landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system  that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”
The  ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only  in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist  who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.
Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose  to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.”  We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld  used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his  famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003.  “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and  over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man  stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there  were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for  laughs.
The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and  Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch.  Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina  hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their  defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any  act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Bush  is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost  poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like  a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has  been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl  Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,”  as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.
To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush  chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as  Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier  to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed  him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a  big reader.”
Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site:  a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s  “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space,  children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of  color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages  require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”
This  document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush  kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He  gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended  December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you  don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan  a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade)  and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the  world’s most corrupt governments).  He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf  past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid  and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).
If  this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his  achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they  devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous  environmentalist.
But the brazenness of Bush’s  alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its  hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict  so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.
The  man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s  that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of  realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The  president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.
He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson)  if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says,  “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall  Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the  2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was  a repudiation of Republicans.”
“The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview,  as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a  Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless  invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into  Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like  an eternity today,” he says,  “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of  the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush  stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.
The crowning personality  tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity  for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,”  he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal.  But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not  that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false  pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he  explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American  people are surely relieved to hear it.
With this level of  self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he  drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by  his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic  dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed  from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”
Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.

I wish I had written that.  Well said...

Worst. President. Ever.  Farewell, Dubya.

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