Farewell, George W. Bush

I did this eight years ago, when Clinton's term expired, and I'm going to attempt it again ... and TRY to be as fair as possible.

First, let's establish one thing: George W. Bush is probably a good guy deep down inside. He strikes me as such. I mean, if I sat next to him at a ballgame, and we struck up a conversation, I'd imagine we'd be able to talk, and laugh, and wax philosophical about our love of baseball and sports.

So I'll go into this thinking he's not the personification of evil. I'll reserve that judgment for some of the others who contributed toward making these last eight years a very dark period in American history. But I'll cut HIM some slack. He reminds me of nothing more than a regular guy who has difficulty hiding his frustration at times, and even more difficulty admitting he might have miscalculated and made some mistakes. Sort of like your average fear-crazed boss bucking for a good review at your expense. Nice enough people ... until cornered. Then, the claws come out, and the fangs bared.

I wasn't happy he got elected, even though I never liked Al Gore. I thought Gore was bad candidate, that he made a poor choice in running mates, and that his campaign, and the way he campaigned, was very uninspiring. On the other hand, Bush is like a lot of political candidates ... great on the stump, able to connect on a personal level, but with nothing tangible to back it up. If I didn't study issues, and really LISTEN to some of the things he said -- not to mention pay attention to the people with whom he surrounded himself -- I might have voted for him too. He was a much more amiable-looking person on the campaign trail, happier, looser, more relaxed, and I would imagine people with no other point of reference voted for him because of that.

I don't know if the election was stolen. It's quite possible that Florida was simply a giant clusterfuck that was nobody's fault, and that the process was irreparably muddled. I know that's the way you steal elections ... create enough doubt and uncertainty as to render the entire process irrelevant. But since the Democrats have done this too in the past too, my reaction to this is shame on THEM for not being prepared for such an eventuality. If they got caught looking -- to borrow a baseball term -- then too bad. It isn't as if it's the first time it ever happened.

But if I were the Republicans, I'd hesitate to be that brazen, on the assumption that the Democrats would have watchdogs on the payroll to ferret out such things. I'll bet the Republicans did!

At any rate, the entire process was a farce, it made the U.S. look bad, and whether it was legit or not, by January 20, 2001, we had a president and it was up to us to at least wish him well. To do anything else borders on unpatriotic, I think. The process played itself out under the system that was put in place to adjudicate it, and, flawed or perfect, it is what it is. If you don't like the process, by all means get it changed by the next election. But absent that, it was what it was.

He wasn't my guy, and I'll admit that once the process started, I hoped, against hope, that they'd find something down there to overturn the results and swing the election to Gore. His issues, and his way of thinking, were more in line with mine. But despite everything, I had this feeling of powerlessness. My president was George W. Bush, I'm an American citizen, and, like him or not, I certainly didn't want him to fail. But I didn't think it was a realistic expectation.

I got an uneasy feeling even before the inauguration ... well, even before the election. Dick Cheney was a Henry Kissinger disciple, and I'm of the opinion that Kissinger, as Machiavellian as they come, did more than any American diplomat of his era to put us in bad standing in the world.

Anyway, that was one of the big reasons I could never have voted for Bush. Another is that even though he seemed like a regular guy, I had no respect for his intelligence or his curiosity (sometimes, you don't even have to be that SMART ... but for God's sake have some innate curiosity about the world around you!).

I saw Bush then -- as I do now -- as a child of privilege who never extended his realm beyond his core world. And while you may counter that the Kennedys were also children of privilege, let's not forget that three of them fought in World War II, one of them was killed, and another wounded badly enough that he was physically incapacitated for the rest of his life. There WAS another side to them ... a side that George W. Bush, by his own doing, avoided seeing.

Simply put, George W. Bush was, to me, a frat boy whose life was bought and paid for by privilege. He might have been an amiable enough fellow, but didn't have a clue as to what the problems in this country were. He rode out every possible crisis the country faced, protected by money and privilege. About the only thing in which he truly succeeded was running the Texas Rangers, and he was so good at that he traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs!

So, my fear wasn't that George W. Bush, himself, would take the country down some lonely, badly-traveled roads; but that the people around him -- the ones who groomed him for this undertaking -- would steer him there, and that he'd lack the requisite intelligence and curiosity to know any better.

As dull, boring, and completely uninspiring as Al Gore was, I got the feeling that he'd at least be his own man. He could have been the most ordinary of ordinary presidents (and I have a feeling he would have been), but I doubt there would have been half the drama, and half the trauma, that we got out of Bush -- and that's even WITH the acknowledgement that 9/11 probably would have happened regardless of WHO was president.

More about 9/11 before we go on. Within months of Bill Clinton's inauguration, terrorists planted bombs beneath the World Trade Center. Within months of George W. Bush's inauguration, terrorists flew planes into the WTC and killed 3,000 people. If the Obama people don't see a trend here, then they're not paying attention and have NO business claiming they were taken by surprise if some radicals try something this year.

But, alas, 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and, rightly or wrongly, he gets the blame. Just as Obama will get the blame if some public mall, or sports venue, is blown to smithereens this year.

Pursuant to 9/11, let me say here that I doubt there was a right, or a wrong, initial response. We needed Bush to express justifiable outrage, and we needed him to pledge, firmly and without hesitation, that those responsible would be held accountable. It's what happened AFTER that, however, what we can debate.

While nobody's suggesting we should ever forget that day, Bush pretty much based his entire presidency on the event. Especially during his first term, when he needed the seed to sprout daily for political purposes, he managed to get Sept. 11 into the conversation every chance he got. It was as if he woke up in the morning, looked at himself in the mirror, and the first words out of his mouth were "9/11." People got irritated with Jimmy Carter during the 1980 campaign for wrapping the flag around himself, hiding in the Rose Garden, and using the Hostage Crisis to his advantage, but he had NOTHING on Bush. George W. had now written the textbook on how to exploit a national tragedy.

Or should I say Karl Rove has.

I think history will judge George W. Bush the same way it judged Warren G. Harding ... as a slow-witted man led astray by advisers with agendas that didn't exactly jibe with the national interest. In an era when the world was changing, and in an era when our enemies had discovered an effective -- deadly, even -- way to level the playing field, Bush's team tried, in vain, to turn the clock back to the 1950s ... the immediate post-WWII aftermath in which the American Way was seen as the World Way by the part of the planet not imprisoned by the so-called Iron Curtain.

Problem is, a lot of water had flown under the dam between 1945 and 2000. Where our reputation, coming out of World War II, was of benevolence and heroism, our armor had been pierced a few times. We overthrew regimes, regardless of their popularity, if it didn't serve our interest. We lost, and lost BADLY, in Vietnam, after all was said and done. Each time we tried to play traffic cop to snuff out some local dispute, we created enemies as a result. A rag-tag band of Iranians got the better of us, holding our diplomats hostage. Zealots snuck a truckload of bombs into a Beirut barracks, killing over 200 marines. We got caught with our pants down in the Iran-Contra scandal. We sent the marines into Granada, and launched a military assault on Panama. We sent troops to Saudi Arabia and drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We launched periodic bombing raids on Iraq.

This isn't to say that some of these actions were justifiable or strategically necessary. But we got a reputation for being heavy-handed in much the same manner Israel is perceived now.

The world may have been prepared to accept a sort of pax Americana in 1945, but it wasn't in 2000. And overtures by the neocons who took over the Bush White House had to appear, to the outside world, as if the U.S. was going to try to reassert its dominance at a time when many countries and cultures were fighting to assert their own way of life. And I think this really came back to haunt the U.S. when it looked for allies to fight in Iraq. Countries that were with us in the 1991 Gulf War, declined this time.

I have no problem with what happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban supported bin Laden, and in that situation, that's guilty enough for me. I just with that Bush had finished one job before going onto the completely unnecessary war in Iraq.

There's plenty of evidence that this was the game-plan from Day 1. Perhaps there were a few neocons who worked in H.W. Bush's regime who disagreed with Poppy when he refused to march onto Baghdad when he had the army and the tactical advantage to do so. But while Poppy may have been patrician and out of touch himself, he was not dumb. Poppy understood, obviously better than the neocon zealots who worked for him, that there was always a "now, what?" about conquering Baghdad.

And the “now, what” would have been the most difficult part of such a campaign. H.W. obviously didn’t want to deal with that, and, in retrospect, I’d say H.W. made the right choice. I’m also guessing that he followed the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the person of Colin Powell, who convinced him that owning Baghdad was more trouble than it was worth.

And Dubya made the wrong choice. Not only did he make the wrong choice, he lied and schemed to win support. I refuse to believe, for example, that Bush didn’t know the intelligence was cooked prior to the invasion. I know I’ve said that he was woefully lacking in curiosity, but you’d have to comatose not to be able to say to your intelligence community “look, SHOW me a weapon – any weapon – and we’ll talk. Until then, forget it.”

No. These people wanted to finish the job they felt Bush I vacated, and they talked his son into doing it. No other explanation fits. And there are all sorts of problems with this. First, all situations change with time … and 10 years is a lot of time. There were obviously other trouble spots, different enemies, different threats … and, well, Saddam Hussein was soooo 1990. He wasn’t bothering anyone outside his own borders. And to the people who try to justify our involvement with the canard that we were overthrowing a cruel dictator, my answer is that there were people over there shooting at US … and OUR citizens, and OUR military. With all due respect to the Iraqi people, we needed to solve THAT problem first. Try to stabilize the rest of the region – as best as you can – and THEN figure out how to deal with Saddam.

Instead, the Bush administration destabilized the region even more. Not only that, it invited radical fringe groups to sprout up all over the country and turn what should have been a relatively easy military exercise (based on the comparative strength of the armies) into a protracted struggle that lasted longer than our involvement in World War II. This was such a monumental failure in planning and execution that it staggers the mind.

This would have been inexcusable even if the circumstances that led to the war were legitimate. The fact that they weren’t makes such gross failure criminal.

The Iraq war tops the list of Bush administration catastrophes because it was conducted under false pretenses and bungled worse than a third-rate burglary. But there were others.

Hurricane Katrina was nobody’s fault, to be sure. And even if federal response was perfectly orchestrated, and even if Brownie HAD done a heck of a job, there would have been devastation in New Orleans of a similar scope to what eventually happened.

But there wasn’t. And while it’s certainly true that state and local authorities should also be held accountable for THEIR part in this massive show of incompetence, the fact remains that there was NO federal oversight until it was much too late.

Acknowledging the fact that natural disasters defy planning and order, the biggest beef I have with Bush over Katrina was his seeming lack of concern while it was happening. As with the days preceding 9/11, when the intelligence community was all over the possibility that something was afoot (they just didn’t know what), Bush remained in vacation mode while one of his country’s most vital cities was literally going under water.

Compare that response to that of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was in the U.S. meeting Ronald Reagan when a massive earthquake ravaged a part of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev hopped the next plane and went back to the USSR. He understood the urgency. Bush didn’t … and still doesn’t.

I was never a fan of Bush’s rhetoric. I cringed at “Axis of Evil,” and “Bring ‘em on.” I thought his ridiculous preening on May 1, 2003, and the whole “Mission Accomplished” fiasco was unconscionable, not only because he turned out to be so wrong, but because he did everything in his POWER to avoid putting the uniform on when it was his time to. It’s one thing to get out of serving in the military. Clinton did it too. But you didn’t see him running around in a fighter pilot’s uniform!

This brings us to the 2004 presidential campaign, when Bush and Rove et al were their most Machiavellian … managing to turn John Kerry’s war record against him, even though Kerry at least HAD one to distort. That took gall, and the only thing I can say about it is that these people were their most cynical when it came to the way they played politics. And we Americans are at our most unconscious when it comes to being able to see through blatant political distortion. Karl Rove understood that, and took advantage of it daily.

I’m sure John Kerry wasn’t the most highly decorated veteran ever to have served in Vietnam. But he went, when he could have easily done the George W. route and hid in the guards … and then not shown up half the time there.

Kerry, like Gore, did not run a good campaign. He didn’t hit back hard enough when Bush attacked his war record. No, it didn’t help him that he took such an active stance in the antiwar protest movement when he came back, or that he threw his medals over a fence, or that he had a different story for every move he made, depending on what day it was. Kerry did plenty to derail himself. And the Democrats were perhaps a little squeamish about the idea of a loose cannon like Howard Dean as their standard bearer too (hindsight being what it is, however, they should have stuck with him. Turns out crazy old Dean had a plan in 2004, and was probably just as responsible, as chairman of the DNC, as anybody else of helping Obama get elected last November).

But damn. Kerry was running against a guy who was in the middle of massively botching the war he’d PLEADED for. And the No. 1 weapon the Bush team used AGAINST him was – of all things – his war record. George Orwell must have smiled, wherever he was.

That, of course, and religious extremism. I think if there’s any one positive that came out of Bush’s presidency it is this: it forced people in this country to re-examine the role religion plays in their lives. Not everybody, of course, because while a lot of Americans woke up to the dangers of religious manipulation, others dove that much deeper into it. That was one of the other big stories of 2004 – the grip that the religious right had on parts of the country.

I should think that by now, all but the most zealously religious can understand WHY it’s dangerous to mix anything “faith-based” with government. All we need to do is see how badly religious extremism, not necessarily in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, has been an instrument of destruction.

Only the unsightly denouement of the Bush presidency in his second term loosened that grip.

Part of Bush’s stubborn streak is due to his religious fervor – his steadfast belief that he’s on the side of “good” as opposed to evil. He never stopped to see, or to even look for, the shades of gray. Because, as with most religions, there are no shades of gray. Only absolutes.

Even before Obama was elected, Bush had already basically abdicated. His standing within his own part had deteriorated to the point where the alleged allies he’d had over the course of his presidency turned on him and embarrassed him badly over the bailout. And although John McCain ran a campaign that was every bit as bad in 2008 as John Kerry’s was in 2004, the fact remains that the financial meltdown greased his skids as much as anything else did. Until the meltdown in October, this race was not only close, it looked as if McCain might even pull it out.

I don’t want to get into the subtle racism of the 2008 campaign, because, honestly, I don’t see where Bush contributed to it. Bush basically stayed out of it. He may have made some half-hearted endorsements of McCain, but he didn’t go out of his way to help the guy – which must really gnaw at McCain, since he all but sold his soul to the neocons in an effort to win.

No. I can blame a lot of things on Bush, but I don’t think you can lay the codified racism at his feet. Mainly because by the time October rolled around, I don’t think he even cared. He knew the end was in sight, and I think he had reached the point where it couldn’t end soon enough. I honestly don’t think it mattered to him who won as much as it mattered to him that he was OUTA HERE!

In fact, I’ll extrapolate a little here and suggest that what really vexed Bush about the meltdown is not that it happened, but that it couldn’t wait until he was out of office. It was like one, final kick in what was already a flaming-red ass.

Once Obama won, Bush all but abdicated. There was no final flurry of activity … no rush to do something monumental to cement his legacy … the way Clinton tried, hard, to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians (do we remember how the Republicans stood in his way so he couldn’t DO that??).

The day after he got elected, Obama said that the country had only one president, and that he was perfectly willing to wait until his time came. Problem was, Bush seemed to want to hand the job off NOW! It was one, final ignominious act in presidency full of them. In the last month, we’ve heard more from Obama on official national matters, particularly with regards to the economy, than we have Bush.

That is sad.

If I were to use a psychological term to describe the Bush presidency it would be “bi-polar.” It was filled with high risks, intertwined with whining and sniveling when hit with criticism. On one hand, he wanted to go boldly where no man had ever gone … but treated those who might not have been up for the trip with scorn and derision. He unfairly questioned people’s patriotism, worked toward defeating politicians who opposed him by hinting they were traitors, felt it necessary – and even allowable – to violate civil rights and engage in the type of torture indigenous to the very people we were fighting … and, in short, probably did more to tarnish this country’s stated standards than any president in my lifetime.

I am not sorry to see him go. My ONLY hope for Barack Obama is that he act in a more even-handed, less arrogant, and less ideologically CERTAIN, manner. I’ll deal with my disagreements with him so long as he refrains from the arrogant recklessness of his predecessor.