Goodbye Silly Bushy

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.

4 thoughts on “Goodbye Silly Bushy”

  1. The thing is that, although he was a cheat, a liar and a crook, Nixon did actually achieve significant and meaningful foreign policy outcomes during his presidency (re: detente with the USSR, normalisation of relations with China and so forth). That doesn’t excuse the harm he did to the US in general and to the office of the president, but in terms of foreign policy, I’d categorise Bush and Nixon quite differently.The revision of Nixon at least acknowledges the major mistakes he made. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of any major successes of the Bush administration that would in any way ameliorate the crass idiocy and evil scheming that they took part in. I can’t see even the most ardent revisions, somewhere down the line, attempting to rehabilitate Bush in the same way. You just don’t have anything to work with when it comes to the guy.
    There have been some comparisons (mostly ill-informed) suggesting that Bush is hoping for the ‘Truman Effect’, whereby his reputation will be restored in years to come (Truman had some of the worst approval ratings of any modern US president, especially around the time of the firing of MacArthur, when he was just about the most hated man in America who wasn’t a suspected ‘commie’. Actually, he as even accused of that by some of the more shrill voices). But, like the Nixon situation, Truman is a fundamentally different case and a fundamentally different man (an essentially decent and, insomuch as a politician can be categorised as such, an honest man).
    All this being said, though, I’m still glad to see Bush and co. getting their arses booted out the the door. The President exists stage left, pursued by panthers.
    “I am not a crook”. Quite.
    Cheers
    Malc

  3. you may wish to listen to NPR intelligence squared podcast:
    Is Bush the Worst President Of The Past 50 Years?
    re: the rehabilitation of Bush

  4. “Bush was always a tool”
    Says it all.
    “I expect he will not find life easy outside of office.”
    I expect he will do what he’s always done: hang out with his buddies being rich, careless and ineffectual. It’s not like he’s suddenly going to go out and mix with the kinds of people who will cause him trouble. He has no reason to. He’s even been quoted as saying he’s looking forward to being bored and idle.
    With any luck next time he chokes on a pretzel the Secret Service will be slower with the Heimlich maneuver.

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