While the usual snark flies over whether or not the George W. Bush Liberry 'n' Tackle Shop contains My Pet Goat and a couple of unfinished coloring books [spoiler: it does!], we can compare the coverage -- the attempt to be "even-handed" versus the cold, hard truth. (Extra points to the Atlantic for its freakshow commenters, especially "Summer," who seems determined to respond to each and every post with precisely the same invective and straw-gathering.)
The things that really stand out about Bush's ultimate legacy are not the tremendously bad decisions (as always, depending on whether you're one of the have-mores or not), nor his inability to pronounce incredibly complicated words such as "nuclear". It's the pains he and his various dogsbodies always took to show how disinterested Himself was in politics to begin with -- which begs the obvious question why didn't he just go into baseball and spare the world from his bumbling indifference?
I doubt we'll ever know the answer to that question; he probably doesn't know the answer himself. This is, after all, a guy who held the most important job on the planet, and could not be bothered to know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. More seriously, much like Sarah Palin, I can't recall a single instance where Bush exhibited anything but disdain for anything beyond the most superficial, facile analysis of any issue, foreign, domestic, financial, whatever. He took pride in going with his gut, and if it went wrong, well, fuck it -- someone else would pay the price, as always.
Forget the argument over whether Bush is intelligent or not. His intellectual acumen is less important than his intellectual perspective -- here is a guy who apparently had no interest in politics, yet became governor and then president; then did a terrible job by any objective measurement, and now claims not to care about history's assessment of his track record, yet is proud of his botchery all the same. Hokay then.
Scarier still is to look at the current model of the GOP, and consider that Shrub was a comparative moderate.
And as Faulkner said, the past isn't over, nor even past, not as long as there are at least two more Bushes jockeying to get back into office, so they can again parcel it out to their donors, rack up more debt for future generations to pay, then toddle off and act like they never wanted the job in the first place. This is precisely why this whitewashing matters, because American politics are dynastic, and have proven over and over again that from either party, there is no incompetence so wretched that it can't be elected if people know the name.
The things that really stand out about Bush's ultimate legacy are not the tremendously bad decisions (as always, depending on whether you're one of the have-mores or not), nor his inability to pronounce incredibly complicated words such as "nuclear". It's the pains he and his various dogsbodies always took to show how disinterested Himself was in politics to begin with -- which begs the obvious question why didn't he just go into baseball and spare the world from his bumbling indifference?
I doubt we'll ever know the answer to that question; he probably doesn't know the answer himself. This is, after all, a guy who held the most important job on the planet, and could not be bothered to know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. More seriously, much like Sarah Palin, I can't recall a single instance where Bush exhibited anything but disdain for anything beyond the most superficial, facile analysis of any issue, foreign, domestic, financial, whatever. He took pride in going with his gut, and if it went wrong, well, fuck it -- someone else would pay the price, as always.
Forget the argument over whether Bush is intelligent or not. His intellectual acumen is less important than his intellectual perspective -- here is a guy who apparently had no interest in politics, yet became governor and then president; then did a terrible job by any objective measurement, and now claims not to care about history's assessment of his track record, yet is proud of his botchery all the same. Hokay then.
Scarier still is to look at the current model of the GOP, and consider that Shrub was a comparative moderate.
And as Faulkner said, the past isn't over, nor even past, not as long as there are at least two more Bushes jockeying to get back into office, so they can again parcel it out to their donors, rack up more debt for future generations to pay, then toddle off and act like they never wanted the job in the first place. This is precisely why this whitewashing matters, because American politics are dynastic, and have proven over and over again that from either party, there is no incompetence so wretched that it can't be elected if people know the name.
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