Yesterday

Where many saw yesterday as a wonderful affirmation of the audacity of hope and reveled in the soaring rhetoric and the grandeur of our functioning republic, I had a hard time getting by the day as the most powerful condemnation of the colossal failure of the Idiot Prince, a resounding repudiation of the epic disaster that he represents. Obama's words, his powerful renouncement of torture, fearmongering, unilateralism, xenophobia, unbridled executive power, obstinance and boastfulness and his embrace of the democratic and constitutional ideals that have been fouled by the outgoing administration was as brazen and shocking a takedown of a sitting historical figure as you may ever see. It was all well deserved, and not a word of it was exaggerated, but I found it startling none the less.

Meanwhile, as Bush slunk off to his faux ranch in his faux home state of Texas, the former Andover and Yale cheerleader surrounded himself with an ever smaller and ever more pathetic circle of sycophants who whine that if only we had his moral compass, we'd see the triumph of the Bush legacy.




A hearty fuck you, W.

The Mighty WSJ

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Jan 16, 2009:

By his own standard, Mr. Bush achieved the one big thing he and all Americans demanded of his Administration. Not a single man, woman or child has been killed by terrorists on U.S. soil since the morning of September 11. Al Qaeda was flushed from safe havens in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and its terrorist network put under siege around the world. All subsequent terror attacks hit soft targets and used primitive means. No one seriously predicted such an outcome at the time.

Pesky reality:

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.

Of course, that's leaving aside the fact that the Bush administration is responsible for allowing the most devastating terrorist attacks on our shores in our history and the greatest failure do defend these shores since the War of Canadian Aggression in 1812. I suppose what his supporters want credit for is that we didn't suffer a second cataclysmic attack after 2001. Somewhere along the line, the original goals of capturing OBL or isolating Islamic fundamentalism fell by the wayside and the triumphant success became the avoidance of a second 9/11.

Getting Everything Wrong

To follow right up on my last post, Juan Cole has a stunning and succinct takedown of Perle, Feist, Kristol and the rest of the neocon movement in Salon. I don't know that I've read a better summation of the criminal wrongheadedness that brought us to this point. Maybe most alarming is that the current situation in Gaza is an afterthought to the end of the tragic Bush era, mainly due to the fact that our own economy dominates our thoughts and headlines.

Cole's conclusion:

The neoconservatives had prided themselves on their macho swagger, their rejection of namby-pamby Clintonian multilateralism, and on their bold vision for reshaping the Middle East so that the Israeli and American right would not have to deal with existing reality. In the cold light of day, they look merely petulant and arrogant. The ancient Greek poet Bion said that boys cast stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest. The neoconservatives were the boys, and the people of Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon have been their frogs. The biggest danger facing the United States is that there will be no true "Clean Break" -- that the neoconservatives will somehow find a way to survive the Bush administration, and continue to influence American foreign policy.

Frogs die in earnest. Indeed.

Read the whole thing, it's illuminating.

Of course, the brutal war in Gaza had become convenient fodder for the Hannity/Beck/NRO wing of Muslim haters, which should not come as a surprise. Lost amidst their bloodthirst is the simple truth that war is all hell, and that the tragedy of Gaza will not be transformed by the wonton loss of Palestinian life.

These guys gotta get their story straight

An integral piece of the Bush Legacy Project is the hard work of polishing the turd that W made in Iraq, and Rove, Bush and Cheney have been been blathering on in one after another "exit interviews" with the absurd notion that the Iraq War is justified/going well/successful. Case in point is of course the shoe-thrower, who Bush famously used as an example of the burgeoning democracy that is breaking out all over Mesopotamia. Aside from the fact that the guy was tortured and jailed without a trial, I suppose he has a point.

But Richard Perle and the neo-cons are reading from a different script, in which he belches:

I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

ThinkProgress does a great job of pointing out the absurdity of Perle's brazen lie, but the more troubling thing is the inconsistency that the formerly buttoned down Bush foreign policy team displays as they race for the exits from the drunken bash they've thrown themselves. Either the mess-o-potamia was and is a ringing success (Bush/Rove/Cheney) or it wasn't (Perle/Kristol/Feith), but it can't be both.

Lazy Blogging

Frank Rich with a great paragraph on the tragic Bush legacy

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.