The Diminishment of George Bush 43

Frank Rich has a great gig with the Opinion Section of the New York Times. He writes once a week on Sundays for the paper and each week he has the opportunity to write largely about the recent past and its contextual relationship to events in our nation's current affairs. This week is no different; he reflects that: "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." Opinion polls suggest Mr. Bush will not be missed once he leaves office and Rich adds his assesssment of Bush: "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 a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it." Rich notes that the trajectory of Bush's presidency has sunken to depths that parallel the disheartening poll results the soon to be president must endure: "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, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes. " Mr Bush has even lost his ability to reign over America as it's undeniably most believable propagandist when two Turkish articles of footwear went sailing dangerously close to Mr. Bush's head and he failed to justify the occurrence when: "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." In the past such seemingly genuine responses by Mr. Bush would have been accepted. Today, no defense by any of the few remaining allies of Mr. Bush can explain away the significance of the event. For the thrown shoe has taken its place as a means for voicing displeasure not only in the Middle East where the practice originated and remained for a great many years if not decades; to spread across the world to the point that it is no longer to throw the shoes at Mr. Bush. It is sufficient to just deposit the shoes in piles, as had recently been done along a Florida highway and the message is received. Now at the end of Mr. Bush's misrule we have finally realized the complete ineptitude of the past eight years: "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." Furthermore the "legacy project" exit strategy being spread by the Bushies to mollify his history writing critics has fallen on deaf ears and shows that: "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." The pro-Bush spin has even included Karl Rove's laughable attempt to portray Mr. Bush as a great reader; as if that disputable fact would warrant Mr. Bush a more amiable portrayal by historians writings to come. This lame attempt to boost up the intellectually curious side of Mr. Bush might work if "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.” And so it goes on; the "legacy project" also exists in the form of a downloadable "booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.” Rich is in top form now as he writes of the booklet: "This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina)." Rich points out that "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... (which show that) 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. He can, however, blame everyone else... if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans... The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere, (and blamable on) intelligence failure.” Rich's assessment exposes: "The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal. But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it." Rich concludes his essay on Bush by pointing out: "With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. 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.”" Rich demonstrates Bush's lack of presidential stature by remarking: "Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him." And Rich has gotten his everyman's psychoanalysis of Bush down cold.