At least that seems to be what Frank Rich is saying in his latest op-ed:
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.
With an opening paragraph like that I couldn't help but continue reading. . .
While yesterday I wrote about the Republicans so distressed by the thought of an Obama inauguration that they are "fleeing" D.C. for the event, George Bush apparently won't be missed by 79% of the country. That's pretty dang on pathetic.
And Rich hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned with this statement:
You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is.
I often find myself feeling sorry for Bush, I mean he IS still a person, and no one should have to suffer getting a shoe thrown at them, especially when the whole world is going to play it over and over and over. . . But then I remember how bad things have gotten in the last 8 years, and that pity goes away.
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.
Then you have the "before" and "after" picture illustrated by his visits to Iraq, in 2003 he was loved, it was PR Gold according to Rich, in 2008. . . he had two shoes thrown at his head (seriously, I guess Secret Service is gonna be happy to see him go too. . . oh wait, don't they have to keep protecting him even after he's out of office? Oops)
I mean literally, the Bush administration has talking points out there on what to say to prove his two terms didn't equal one giant failure.
Titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record," the talking points state that Bush "kept the American people safe" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained "the honor and the dignity of his office."
The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success. (warning, the link is a PDF)
while that document points out the fluffy, it leaves out the reality:
The document is otherwise silent on the recession, which claimed 533,000 jobs in November, the highest number in 34 years.
Also, 8 years in office, and they could only come up with 52 pages of positive stuff? That's not good, and the font is kind of big, AND it has pictures. . . lots of pictures (some of which are rather large)
Now I'm hearing people saying that "history will judge Bush's Presidency" even poor Laura Bush had to get in on it
It's always funny when I hear the talking points, but I digress.
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.
Didn't Bush say in one interview that they don't talk about the bad stuff in the White House? Maybe that explains his ability to remain so out of touch with the reality of what his Presidency has done to us?
But you know what? Bush did do one good thing. He made his party and Karl Rove politics practically irrelevant:
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."
I literally LOL'd when I read Karl Rove trying to convince us all that Bush likes to read real books, I mean the ones that aren't just pictures :o)
In the interest of copyright rules, I don't want to blockquote too much more of Rich's column, but I'm sure you will all enjoy it, so please read it. I'll leave you with Rich's last two sentences:
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.
While God IS good, that's seriously all Bush learned in his Presidency?