By John Wilkes from Eyesonobama.com:
Just two months out of office, former President George W. Bush is getting ready to begin his first post-presidential book, tentatively titled Decision Points, outlining 12 crucial decisions he made while in office. Perhaps a better title would have been, "What The Hell I Was Thinking."
By John Wilkes from Eyesonobama.com:
Just two months out of office, former President George W. Bush is getting ready to begin his first post-presidential book, tentatively titled Decision Points, outlining 12 crucial decisions he made while in office. Perhaps a better title would have been, "What The Hell I Was Thinking."
With the perspective of hindsight (albeit, just a very little bit of it), one can’t help scratching his or her head when thinking back on the last eight years of American policy. A gifted politician surrounded by a team of political savants, Bush never really got a handle on governing. The most important calls weren’t formulated the way presidential directives should be- reasoned, unimpassioned, and painstakingly analyzed. Instead, Bush waged the fortunes and security of an entire nation on gut instinct.
With that in mind, Bush’s memoir sounds to be something of an encyclopedia of excuses, a justification of all that went wrong during his tenure.
The real problem is that Tim Russert isn’t around anymore, because Bush shouldn’t be allowed to answer such important questions on his own terms. What Dubya’s essentially going to say is this, and I’m sorry if this spoils it for anyone planning on forming an early line outside of Barnes & Noble: "I made the decision I felt was right based on the information in front of me." But what he really should say (if he were being truthful) is this: "I made the decision I felt was right and went out and found the information that validated it." If Russert were asking the questions instead of Bush simply pontificating, that would be quite clear.
There are questions that Americans should have been able to ask themselves, and essentially have been asking for the last eight years without any substantive response, and a lot of them aren’t going to be answered:
* "If there were no weapons of mass destruction, no link to 9/11, no link to terrorism or impending threat to the US or its allies, why did you decide to invade Iraq?"
* "Why did you disregard the advice of generals like Eric Shinseki who said more troops were needed to do the job and instead back Don Rumsfeld’s plan, only to turn around and advocate a ‘surge’ that elevated troop levels to the numbers Shinseki had estimated were necessary to begin with?"
* "Why did you politicize the Terri Schaivo issue when you knew it had nothing to do with federal governmental policy?"
* "How did your tax cuts back in 2001 help stimulate the economy?"
* "Why did you appoint high-level donors to top administration posts instead of selecting qualified, experienced experts in their particular fields?"
* "Having gone to Yale, do you really not believe in evolution?"
* "If the US attorneys were not fired for political reasons, and they weren't fired for performance reasons, why were they terminated at all?"
* "In deciding to sign off on waterboarding and other "pseudo" torture techniques likely in violation of the Geneva Convention, did you consider that such action would subject American prisoners of war to similar treatment?"
* "How does your administration justify its failure to adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina?"
None of these questions are new. They're the same ones the White House press corps asked every day while Bush was in office. To think that the answers will be any different now is just silly. Make no mistake: Decision Points will be on Bush’s terms, as they have been for some time now. We may never get answers on what went so horribly wrong in the Bush White House. At least not from the horse's mouth.
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