This isn’t some mad movie dictator or Darth Vader speaking. It’s an actual real grownup talking to other grownups. What people forget about Bush, amidst the lying, the mediocrity, and the stench of a bumbling cartoon upper-class scoundrel, is that he has an entitled, condescending Yale streak of meanness a mile wide. Remember how he once chuckled over the fate of a woman whose death sentence he’d confirmed? That’s a part of the Bush character we tend to forget. It takes a real mean mutha to send young American soldiers to their deaths just to enrich your Texas oil buddies.
Of course, the Bush-Cheney CEOs weren’t only bad characters, they were also massively incompetent, since they always picked ideologically loyal underlings over pragmatically competent ones. One can actually imagine an occupation of Iraq that might have gone well. Go in, topple Saddam, put a strong-man Shiite in charge of the Iraqi Army and Baathist bureaucracy instead of dismantling those bodies, and get the hell out. Instead, the fools put Bremer in charge, and magnified the blunder of the war with his blundering occupation, just as they blundered Katrina with the blundering Brownie. Bremer spent his time passing hundreds of laws about stuff like restricting corporate taxes to 15% — he was sent there to create a Wall Street Journal corporate utopia – while all around him US troops busted down the front doors of Iraqi citizens at three in the morning and created an insurgency of angry Iraqis instead.
So what was the effect of Bush’s character on your life? If you’re very rich, you are now richer. If you’re middle-class, you’re paying way more for gas and food, and you may be having your house foreclosed on. If you’re a kid, one day you’ll be paying off debts that are now in the trillions, what with two wars costing $16 billion a month and earmarks and trade deficits and the plunging dollar and all the borrow-and-spend habits of a drunken Republican administration wasting your taxes like it’s their personal alcohol (US public and private debt was $49 trillion last year, so you and every American man, woman and child are each $160,000 in debt). If you’re a liberal, you may have been crying solidly for years now. If you’re a conservative, you’re wondering how the hell a supposedly conservative administration ruined your conservative dreams. If you’re a tourist in another country, you may have to listen to a lot of valid criticism of your country. If you’re Cheney or Rumsfeld, you may not be able to travel freely abroad because overseas prosecutors are waiting to make themselves famous by arresting you as a war criminal, like they did with Pinochet. If you’re a Republican, you’re wondering how many decades it’ll take before you taste real power again. If you’re a proud American, you’re wondering what you have to be particularly proud of besides the iPhone. And if you’re one of over 4,000 unfortunate soldiers who went to Iraq, you’re dead.
Article comments
1 - Dave Nalle
Wow Adam, this one is so amazingly out of touch with reality it's like you're channelling messages from another universe.
Nice to see you're warming up to Bush, though.
Dave
2 - maria
this is a great article. I hope that more Americans allow themselves the opportunity to read through some of your insight. Well done!
3 - bliffle
Engrossing article with an interesting Point Of View. But a little long.
4 - Georgio
Adam ..It was a long article but I read it all and I agreed with most of it ..First of all I don't think you where fair to Hillary..after all she did get 18 million votes and she won the states that the Dems need to win in the general and O bama won states that we will not win in the general especialy the south..
I am from Chicago and have followed Obamas rise from the beginning..truth is he never would have even become the Democratic candidate to run for the ticket if his opponent who was 17 pts ahead of him didn't have a wife who went on TV and said he is a wife beater,,so Obama won the right to face the republican candidate who also was favored to win the election but can you believe it ..the repulican also had a scandle that did him in so one might say OBama became a Senator by pure luck..I would also say he beat Hillary with pure luck also because if the association he had with the reverend and others was known from the beginning he would not have gotten to first base .
I am a Democrate and will vote for him but I have serious problems with him ..In the beginning I liked him because of his message of hope and a new beginning that politics in Washington would change..But the longer the fight went on the more he sounded just like every other politician..
The black community backed him 94% and if that is not raceism in reverse than I have a bridge I want to sell to you..the GOP will exploit this because they will put doubts in minds of white voters because they are not worried about turning the blacks against them because they know they are not going to get thier votes anyway...
Adam I hope he can be the kind of President that will help this country but I see no chance at all unless Hillary is on the ticket and right now I don't see that happening.
5 - Baronius
Georgio, that's interesting because I can't see Obama winning with Clinton on the ticket. Second-guessing from Hillary, third-guessing from Bill, parallel organizations... it would be the worst thing for party unity. A party unifies under one leader, with no looking back.
Dave, I found the article interesting because it probably accurately reflects the views of people I disagree with. It's interesting to see facts (and opinions) used as building blocks to create something I'd never imagine. It doesn't make sense to me that someone could look at Obama and see coolness and character, but the truth is that some people do.
6 - Georgio
Baronius..the reason I say Hillary has to be on the ticket is because she won states that the Dems need to win ..Obama won states that the GOP will win in the general..any other VP that he picks could get him one or two states but this election will come down to Fl ,OH ,PA, Mich..Obama can't win these states without Hillary.
7 - Baronius
Georgio - I don't buy into this thinking that FL, OH, PA, and MI are wearing chastity belts that only Clinton can unlock. Clinton won two of those states because Obama didn't campaign in them. In Ohio, the GOP has made such fools of themselves that I can't imagine them voting for a Republican for a decade. That leaves Pennsylvania, the state of bitter gun-toting Bible-thumpers. They've got more problems with Obama than a running mate could solve.