Frank Rick, a NYT pundit writes about the exiting Bush Administration.
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 puzzlement...
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... Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.
This is how Republicans stay alive. They pay no attention to the 4 MILLION refugees living in tent cities in Southern Lebanon and Southern Syria. Or 2 hours of electricity in Baghdad. Or $2 trillion dollars of American taxpayer dollars spent on Imams so they won't attack us. Or the spent public sentiment poisoned about the US that now kidnaps and tortures tens of thousands of people in gulags across this world.
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."
Funny how democracy works (something that Bush claims to know), when Pericles in ancient Athens, the Father of Democracy, forced it upon the Thebans, they revolted. In fact, lots of City-states in the Peloponnesian wars despised the fact that another government was imposed upon them and sided with Sparta that won the wars.
The ruins of his administration's top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but also in the new "democratic" Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured.
Now come the apologists. The guilty who want to say they were just taking orders, or the intelligence was faulty, or that Jimmy Carter caused the economic meltdown.
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!"
Those poor victims of the press that sold the war for them lock stock and smoking barrel. I need to pause and wipe a tear away....OK. I'm OK.
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."
Calling Bush an intellectual is like calling Stalin an ethicist. Yes I said it.
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.
Hagiography, the rewriting of actual history has become an art for Republicans and a perjorative for scholars
"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 Maida attack. But it was an "intelligence failure," not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious "mushroom clouds," that sped us into Iraq.
Frank Rich's column rocked me because it is soooooo true. I think it will rock you as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/...