Silly Bushy leaves office shortly. He’s delivering a farewell speech in about 24 hours but his last press conference signalled what that will be like: arrogant, unrepentant, blinkered.
How unfit this man was for office; how naive and clueless he was. For example, this staggering foolishness of this claim, so ridiculous in its audacity that I clipped it from a newspaper and kept it: Jan 10, 2008: Bush Predicts Mideast Peace In A Year. How bitterly ironic that as that year ticks up, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is not merely unresolved, but as far from peaceful as it has been for many years.
Aside from his enormous ignorance, it is his lack of empathy that I will remember, and his complete subjugation to the monstrous Dick Cheney. I have been waiting so long for Bush to be gone, we all have, but it now seems like such an anticlimax; is he still on the stage? How long is he going to stand there? When’s the new guy coming on? I want to see the new guy! Bush has been prematurely forgotten, which is astonishing considering the massive harm he has presided over and, frequently, caused. But I suppose we’re just sick of thinking about him. He wore out our fury, in the end.
Which means that I find myself in the unsettling position of agreeing with Boris Johnson, who wrote a chiding mockery of Bush for the Telegraph, but concluded: “without wishing to defend G W Bush, I want to enter an important qualification. Yes, he did lead the coalition to topple Saddam, and was, therefore, implicated in the loss of tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. But at every stage he did so with the messianic support of Tony Blair, and the tacit approval of Gordon Brown; and when it came to persuading a reluctant public of the threat posed by Iraq, it should never be forgotten that the Labour Party and their spin doctors were far more ruthless and duplicitous than the White House.”
Quite. The venom I felt, and still feel, towards Tony Blair is undiminished but I have nothing like that degree of fury towards Bush. Bush was always a tool of those more clever and more wicked than he; this does not exonerate him in the least, but at least makes sense of the pity that I feel for him mixed in with the anger. I expect he will not find life easy outside of office. (At least until he is revisioned into a misunderstood hero in, say, twenty years, as Nixon was.)
Goodbye Silly Bushy, and your Cheney and your entire noxious ecosystem. The reality-based community delights in your departure.