Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency.
Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.
At least that's what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.
I despise smirky tropes and devices like the one above. It doesn't even qualify as "clever" or "deceptive"; it's just an empty, weird attention grabber. "Breaking news! Gas prices back to $1.00/gallon! Heh, at least that's what went through my mind the last time I used half my Cheeto per diem to fill up my hooptie." Unprecedented access to Junior's thinkamatin' sounds about as inviting as watching Tony Blankley assault a defenseless ham hock.
Seriously, from an operational standpoint, this has been the most deliberately opaque administration since Nixon. Here's the thing if you fancy yourself a "journalist": if a prominent figure -- and I don't care of it's Dubya Bush, B. Hussein Obama, or whoever -- convenes a gaggle of you and your colleagues behind closed doors and tells you everything is off the record, you are being used. You are not reporting anything, you're just a PR stooge, nothing more. It's a circle jerk.
As for why Bush's maddening foolishness (to use Goldberg's own descriptives) focused on foreign policy, what the fuck else is he going to talk about? How completely, catastrophically ineffectual he has been in having an economic policy that benefits anyone but the top of the pyramid? How we have to start drilling and perforating every square inch of federal land so's the oil can come online in six years, when gas is seven bucks a gallon? I don't know what's worse, that Goldberg knows better, or that he might actually believe what he writes.
"When I write my book," the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration.
I'm sure he's right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.
Riiiight. Look, fool, if/when he writes his book, only two things will be notable about it -- one, nothing in it will be remotely true nor accurate (nor, for that matter, controversial), and two, people may idly wonder who actually wrote the damned thing for him. We've heard about the "behind-the-scenes diplomacy" plenty, the stovepiping of bullshit information, the secret meetings to force facts into preconceived conclusions, the Iranians quietly reaching out in 2003 only to be smacked down by "diplomats", etc. If someone wants to plunk down thirty bucks for tissue-thin rationales and shopworn, self-serving homilies, they're probably not working hard enough for their money.
Indeed, President Bush's reputation is not as solidified as his detractors and fans think.
If Iraq becomes a stable and democratizing nation, his presidency will look much better than it does today. But if Iraq Balkanizes or Lebanon-izes, then Democratic rhetoric about the "worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" will gain descriptive heft. Only time will tell.
Ah, the old "if" gambit, tethered to the usual cheap open-ended timeline. Awesome. See, if we check in five or ten years hence, and Iraq is still a sectarian charnel house, we just haven't let the Gumbo O' Freedomocracy™ simmer quite long enough. No matter how bad it continues to get, it will never be quite long enough to know for sure. If Doughboy's aunt had balls, she'd be his uncle. Or his mama.
On the other hand, if the country has exhausted itself into some semblance of stability, it won't be because the sectarian cleansers ran out of people to slaughter, or that Baghdad has been walled into a lockdown Habitrail, or that the Iranians are puppeteering whatever passes for a central government. It'll automatically be because of Dear Cheerleader's singular vision and resolve, his patience in staying the course, no matter how many people had to get butchered in the process, and how much it cost.
Having principles is a tough gig, as you can see by all of Pantload's sacrifices. Why, he braved a trip into the Oval Office, kneepads and all, for the chance to come away with vivid descriptions of Fredo's wardrobe, and impossibly vague "impressions" of what the man actually said. Again, even celebrity journalists have higher standards than this. Jesus, I'm embarrassed for this clown at this point. He's so far in the tank he has to wear scuba gear.
The Jonanism continues on to its inevitable climax, a torrent of flop sweat and Funyun crumbs:
Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.
Yeah, I'm sure you heard about all those Haitians Clinton had holed up in Gitmo for half a decade, unable to communicate with anyone in the outside world or have representation, subjected to humiliation and aggressive interrogation tactics. You know, all those Haitians that were waterboarded and force-fed and stuck in sensory deprivation holes until they lost their minds? And as loathsome a practice as extraordinary rendition is, Clinton used it exclusively against perpetrators and suspects of the 1993 WTC attack. They weren't kidnapping German and Canadian citizens who had the wrong name and shipping them to black sites to be broken.
Indeed, this administration and its surrogates have brought a heavy-handed glee to these extralegal ops that would normally be associated with banana republics and communist dictators. They've literally pulled innocent people off the street, chained them to a dungeon ceiling, and beat their legs until they died in agony. They let the Chinese visit Gitmo to turn the screws on a Uighur prisoner. They turned Saddam's most notorious hellhole into a playground for a bunch of inbred psychopaths. And that's the shit we know about. Put that in your fuckin' memoir, son.
Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.
Oh, so it's Obama's "ideological leanings and inexperience" that would leave him room for mistakes. Fat fucking chance. Should Obama actually win the election (a dubious assumption considering the insatiable need for a certain portion of the citizenry to stick their thumbs in their asses and call it good), Goldberg and his ilk will be all over him the second the final vote is tallied. Any missteps, no matter how small, real or contrived, will be blown to monumental proportion to the same degree they were willing to overlook the ones their boy made every step of the way.
Make no mistake. Any successes Obama has regarding Iraq will be in spite of what these eternally damned buffoons have wrought. He is in the running because he has promised to clean up Fredo's mess, not extend it or endorse it. To the extent he actually does continue any of the current policies, chances are it will be primarily because the lame-duck termites are working furiously to lock the successor in.
It's just too bad that neither Bush, his associates, nor his florid defenders will ever face a fraction of the karma they've earned, for their smug indifference to the misery they've inflicted here and abroad. Absent actual justice, the sooner these weasels are repudiated, the sooner they can be marginalized and blessedly ignored.
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