As Dubya's Time Draws Short

(The logo was left over from a prior post, meant as a shot over all of the supposed subliminal advertising by this administration, such as “securing the homeland” or “ensuring economic prosperity” in those cheesy backdrops, part of that legendary “message discipline” which hasn’t been seen for some time.)

If you’re looking for a fairly sickening example of pitiable self-absorption, I can’t think of anything that topped Peter Baker’s feature article on George W. Milhous Bush in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine (here).

And I don’t mean to criticize Baker when I say that; the story of the inevitable winding down of the reign of the most execrable human being to ever inhabit An Oval Office is something that should be reported.

Baker presents a fairly rich tableaux of denial, misinterpretation, character assassination, denial, reality avoidance, factual confusion, misplace hero worship, denial, filial non-communication, and preoccupation with utter triviality (did I mention denial?). And it is thoroughly emblematic of the Republican pirates who have made an utter mockery of the executive branch of our government.

There’s so much here that I can’t get to it all in a single post, but I’ll mention the following lowlights…

Bush has been so far down for so long (in the polling numbers) that his aides long ago gave up any hope that the numbers would change while he is still in office. “There’s kind of a liberating aspect to it,” Dan Bartlett told me over lunch in July, at a homey steak joint in Austin, where he returned after leaving the White House last year. “It’s not that you chase polls, but you’re cognizant of them. So if you know they’re not going to change, you can just do what you think is right.”

“So if you know that they’re not going to change, you can just do what you think is right”; does that seriously imply that they haven’t been doing “what they (thought) was right” all of this time? If so, then just what the hell did they think they were they doing? Or aren’t we supposed to know?

Continuing...

If anything, it may be that the low numbers have become almost a badge of honor for Bush. Not that he wants to be unpopular, but he sees leadership as a test. “Calcium” is a favorite term he uses with aides to describe the backbone he admires. “He does make a lot of references to Truman as the model of his late presidency, and the Truman model is unrewarded heroism — or ‘heroism’ is not the right word: unrewarded courage,” Michael Gerson, another former senior adviser to the president, told me. “It fits very much his approach and his self-conception. His view of leadership is defined as doing the right thing against pressure.”

Gerson is a despicable hack and an utter toady.

There is nothing – repeat, NOTHING – in the life and experience of George W. Bush that is translatable to any other president who preceded him, with the possible exceptions of Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding, three of the worst presidents this country has ever seen up until now.

As noted here, Truman was a World War I artillery officer, a judge, a United States Senator, the head of the Truman Commission to investigate contractor fraud during World War II, and a president who saw the conclusion of the war which consumed more of this country’s vast resources than any other (still including our current mess in Iraq). And oh yes, he had the spine to fire perhaps this country’s most honored military figure (rightly or wrongly; the former in my book) and thus prevent a ground war against the nation with the largest population in the world.

Dubya, on the other hand, saw some questionable military service with the Texas Air National Guard before he “transitioned” back to civilian life as a business failure, a figurehead owner of a major league baseball team, a ceremonial governor, and an utterly wretched president.

Any questions?

Continuing…

Donald Ensenat, a friend of Bush’s for more than 40 years who worked as his chief of protocol before stepping down last year, said that the president’s view, as he paraphrased it, has come down to this: “I’ve already taken my last licks for being unpopular, so these last two years I do what’s right — that’s my job, not with my finger in the air.”

I can think of a wholly other place for that finger, just for the record.

Oh, and by the way, concerning “the surge”…

(In December 2006) Bush announced…a plan (similar to the McCain plan to escalate our forces by approximately 30,000), overruling the objections or concerns of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his outgoing field commanders, the Iraq Study Group (led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton), the new Democratic majorities in Congress and a sizable number of his fellow Republicans — all part of a Washington consensus that, to varying degrees, wanted him to pull troops out, not send more in. McCain, for once, was impressed that Bush stood up to the pressure. In his mind, that was real leadership.

“He could have done the easy thing,” says Terry Nelson, a political strategist who worked for both Bush and McCain. “He could have taken the Baker-Hamilton report, and everyone would have said that was good. And instead, he took a gigantic political risk, which today seems to be paying enormous benefits in terms of security in Iraq and political progress. And he gets no credit. None.”

I’ll tell you what, Terry; why don’t you contact the friends and family members of some of the heroes noted here and ask THEM how much credit they think Dubya should get, OK?

(Note: Apparently, there was a malicious server attack on icasualties.org a few months ago, and I'm having trouble accessing the site - typical Repug-simpatico crap.)

And I know the Repugs are going to go on and on and on about “the surge” this week in St. Paul, by the way (that and “drill, drill, drill” are the only bows in their metaphorical quiver, if you will – a truly sad state for which they have only themselves to blame…and to be honest, I wish the Dems had taken on “the surge” last week – maybe they did and I missed it).

Here’s the deal: there’s a reason why the surge followed the “Anbar Awakening,” and that is because the former would not have been possible without the latter. Throwing more and more of our fine service people into the Iraq meat grinder has been a ruinous act anyway, but particularly so when a significant portion of the country didn’t stand up for itself. However, they did to an extent with the "awakening," and that ensured some degree of “surge” success (though – and I say this sarcastically often enough, but it’s true here – “no one could have foreseen” that). Also, the point of the surge was to buy time for the Iraq “government” to get its act together, which they seem to be doing somewhat, though not exactly the way Bushco wants, I’m sure (and all of this could blow up at a moment’s notice).

But here’s the $64,000 question for which I have yet to hear a good answer from the Repugs: if the “surge” was such a success, why aren’t our people coming home from Iraq RIGHT FREAKING NOW???!!!

To reiterate, I think Baker has done us a service by chronicling the utterly pathetic demise of the Bushco nightmare. I consider this a prelude of sorts to Bob Woodward’s upcoming book as well as Oliver Stone’s movie.

And to conclude, I’ll let Mrs. Doomsy have the last word; she started to read Baker’s article but gave up, asking aloud, “Are we supposed to feel sorry for the son of a bitch?”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Update 9/3/08: O'Hanlon and the other Iraq war apologists (Tom "Suck. On. This." Friedman, Clap Hanson, Krauthammer, etc.) should be strung up as food for the buzzards (here).