Why I (Now) Feel Sorry For George W. Bush
Perhaps I am going soft in my dotage, but I felt a twinge of sorrow for George Bush as he stood next to Barack Obama during the 9/11 anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero on Sunday morning. There was that familiar facial expression somewhere between a smirk and bewilderment, and a reminder that his greatest legacy will forever be launching the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time on the pretext that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks. Yet I found that the anger I had long felt for the frat boy from Crawford has pretty much evaporated.
It also occurred to me that things might have been different — perhaps very different — had Dick Cheney not be Bush’s vice president, the guy whom he refers to as “Uncle Dick” in Pat Oliphant’s powerfully biting political cartoons of the era, a guy who we are re-reminded in his recently published memwow never made a mistake and, it turns out, never learned from all the mistakes that he never made.
So despite the fact that Bush screwed up nearly everything he did, some of it without the help of Uncle Dick, and left Obama with a steaming stable of offal to shovel out from Day One, putting all that Hope and Change stuff on hold, he really had the deck stacked against him.
Bush, after all, got into politics in the first place because he was a failure at everything else (thank you, Poppy Bush and Karl Rove). Then he had to figure out what to be and became a compassionate conservative whose heart, I have come to believe, was in the right place but he had a big hole where the ideas were supposed to germinate. Not to worry, sociopathic Uncle Dick and the malodorous Neocon Brain Trust took care of that and before you could say Mission Accomplished they had beaten every last shred of compassion from his agenda.
Then Bush felt the buzz saw of what Sarah Palin, in a recent unguarded moment of actually saying something intelligent, referred to as the “permanent political class” that governs the U.S. that is drawn from both parties and is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people.
Finally, Bush let down the Family Values crowd, which eventually sensed that he was not really one of them, accelerating the great schism that characterizes today’s Republican Party with the moderates pretty much locked in the superintendent’s office and the inmates running the asylum.
That has gifted us with one of the three leading GOP presidential wannabes believing that Social Security is a giant con game and another claiming that Obama is going to open Soviet gulag-like reeducation camps, while the third is suffering the slings and arrows of political adversity because he engineered a landmark health-care reform law with the help of Democrats and Republicans and Catholics and Protestants alike that has left a national low 5 percent of Massachusetts residents uninsured. For shame!
There has been only one president in my life whom I hated and that was Richard Nixon. (My mother trained our collie to growl when he heard Tricky’s name.) That hatred, in part engendered because of the friends who made one-way trips to Vietnam because of Nixon’s lies, has never dissipated. You see, he was on my Enemies List, but even during the darkest days of the Bush administration I never hated Dubya.
Anyhow, I remarked to an acquaintance over a cold one later on Sunday that I felt sorry for Bush, thereby breaking one of the cardinal rules of the things I never discusses in bars (politics, religion and whether O.J. was guilty).
“What? You feel sorry for a war criminal?” he shot back, uttering perhaps the first political statement in our 35 years of friendship, as well as a rare display of anger.
“Okay, forget about it,” I replied. “The next round’s on me.”
21 Responses to “Why I (Now) Feel Sorry For George W. Bush”
W was a weak-minded puppet of stronger men with dubious (or even malicious) intentions. It will be some time before I change my mind, if ever. His Presidency was a train wreck although, honestly, not a total failure. His administration does deserve credit for not allowing a repeat of 9/11 throughout the rest of his term. There were real threats and real attempts in the following years, and none hit their mark.
Speaking of former presidents deserving scorn, I will never forgive LBJ for escalating the Vietnam War, our greatest self-inflicted tragedy ever (regardless of his accomplishments in civil rights legislation).
You are very generous Shaun.
I never hated him, or even Nixon, either. It’s just that George W. Bush and Richard Nixon both embarrassed and disgusted me. Like you, I feel that Bush was led into deciding things that he may otherwise not have rationalized that he should have decided. George W. Bush, I suspect more than any other president since Hoover, wishes he had a do over out of raw guilt. Very poor choice for an executive position, and that should have been obvious to those whom know him. So I blame those that set him up to get him in the White House to begin with. These people cannot possibly have our country’s best interest at heart.
I’ve had a lot of similar thoughts recently. I would be less worried if W were running again and leading in the polls than I am about the current crop. I honestly believe that W has a personal sense of compassion in there someplace which kind of got buried once he was in the oval office. I am struggling to get any sense of compassion from any of the current GOP crop other than perhaps Huntsman.
jdwincu:
You will be struggling for a long time.
Witness the wild shouts of approval in the Tea Party debate last night when it was suggested that people be allowed to die if they don’t have health insurance.
Shaun says:
“Witness the wild shouts of approval in the Tea Party debate last night when it was suggested that people be allowed to die if they don’t have health insurance.”
Thanks for confirming what I didn’t want to believe last night (or have confirmed).
I thought I heard the Family Values Tea Party crowd roar in approval when a couple of people shouted what I thought was “Let him die,” when the question was asked as to what to do about a hypothetical young man who chose not to buy health insurance and needed intensive care.
Dorian:
The “let him die” line is being spun with vigor today by Tea Party sycophants who point out, as do you, that Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical was of a young man who could afford health insurance but chose not to buy it.
Why this somehow forgives the abject cold-bloodedness of these people is beyond my capacity to understand, as were the roars of approval when Rick Perry boasted of his record as Lone Star State executioner at a debate last week.
It’s times like this that I kind of miss some of the trolls who have been banned at TMV whose mindsets so often were in synch with this crowd. At least we might get an explanation for these pathologies even if we were appalled by them.
Allen, well said; “Very poor choice for an executive position, and that should have been obvious to those whom know him. So I blame those that set him up to get him in the White House to begin with. These people cannot possibly have our country’s best interest at heart.” I guess you recognize that you described Obama and the Dems.
Let them die. Just proves there are some schmucks in the TP as there are in the R/P parties.
And, what is going on with some of you guys showing other than pure vitriolic rhetoric for any Rep. Puhleez. Next time I sip a wonderful cold Chardonnay with my friend Adolph (recently returned from his estate in Argentina), I plan on mentioning that Clinton was a great “sax player”.
Shaun, I don’t “hate” GWB, but as an American who loves his country I remain deeply disappointed in the utter lack of accountability when it comes to abuses of power at the highest levels. That said, I expect he and his pals may have some splainin to do once they exit this earthly plane.
Btw, I love this passage:
“My mother trained our collie to growl when he heard Tricky’s name.”
Now that is awesome!
JSpencer:
And my mother’s mother had an Irish setter who would growl whenever she said “Where’s Hitler?”
It’s times like this that I kind of miss some of the trolls who have been banned at TMV whose mindsets so often were in synch with this crowd. At least we might get an explanation for these pathologies even if we were appalled by them.
The explanation would be many feel that those who engage in risky behavior should bear the consequences. In this case it isn’t unreasonable to expect the man who can afford health insurance but chooses not to, to bear the consequences. Unfortunately the Tea Partiers took that mindset to an extreme and lost perspective.
Practically though the consequences would not be dying, they would be bankruptcy and shifting most of the cost to the public.
Shaun Says:
“The ‘let him die’ line is being spun with vigor today by Tea Party sycophants who point out, as do you, that Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical was of a young man who could afford health insurance but chose not to buy it.”
Shaun, I did not intend for the mention of the “hypothetical” bit to in any way justify or diminish my disgust with the Tea Party “psychopaths” who shouted “let him die” or cheered such on.
And, dduck, I am talking about those Tea Party “psychopaths” who participated in this disgusting show and not about “any Rep.”
At the risk of skating further away from the gist of my post, the provision of Obama’s health-care reform initiative requiring most able-bodied people to buy insurance would include that hypothetical young man.
The provision is not supposed to kick in until 2016, I think, and at the rate things are unraveling may never come to pass.
dduck-
How do you figure? That in no way describes; “Obama and the Dems”. The President, and, the Dems are pushing social programs that care for our people, not ripping the very life sustaining foundation out from under them.
I don’t get you duck. You are like; from another planet.
DaGoat-
Yeah, poverty is risky behavior alright. Especially with a Republican in power.
Healthcare is an inalienable right to life. Just like it is in every modern nation on earth even among those without “inalienable rights” within their founding documents or declarations.
There is no “Choice” if you cannot afford the cost. This is where “provide for the general welfare” comes in. These Tea Baggers are selfish idiots.
In some respects, the defining political issue of the next few years — as well as the issue that will define America and its people — will not be deficit reduction or tax reform but the future of health-care reform.
I cannot agree more that health care is, as Allen states, an inalienable right. This was determined many years ago in other industrialized nations, but that peculiar brand of American capitalism that puts the “rights” of insurance and drug companies and for-profit hospital chains ahead of those of Joe and Jane Sixpack trumps everything else.
A consequence is tens of millions of uninsured Americans, many of them children, and a health-care system where costs are many times more than those in other industrialized nations with substantially better mortality rates.
“I don’t get you duck. You are like; from another planet.” Allen you have discovered my secret. And, the point is for people like you to not “get me”. On our planet we have open minds and people discuss rather than throwing poop at each other like two bands of monkeys.
Dorian, I said “some of you guys”, without naming names, some of my best friends are Dems and some of the dumbest people are Reps. My problem is with the ones that only see things in black and white, nary a shade of gray, in a partisan way.
dduck-
What point is it to see gray?
So you can see Dorian.
dduck says:
“So you can see Dorian.”
I guess you mean Dorian Gray? Clever, and cute.