Bush in Retrospect

I try, not always with 100% success, to be a scrupulously honest man when it comes to matters of the intellect (with respect to all other forms of integrity, I concur with those who believe that when a man tells you he is completely honest about everything, immediately feel for your wallet). So when I watched President Bush yesterday at one of his rare press conferences, I had to admit that the man has made strides since his early days as chief executive. True, his eyes still dart about the room, he hunches his shoulders and stares at the podium, he mangles words with the same alacrity as ever, but his diction and even his candor seem to have improved with the passing years. He used the word "conflate" correctly, as one example. I forget the context, but he nailed it.

President Bush even makes sense if you disregard (a) all previous history of what he's talking about and (b) reality. His discussion of the energy crisis yesterday is a good example. To hear him talk, you would be hard put to identify the person who has been president for the last 7.5 years. Apparently, he "warned" us about the coming problem with gasoline and his administration has been "working hard" on alternative fuels because they've always known the remaining fossil fuels (he even used the word "hydrocarbons") are simply a transitional energy source till we get to the next paradigm (he did not use "paradigm;" let us not hope for too much too soon).

It's funny, but I don't remember President Bush, in the period between 2001 and late 2006, when the Republicans owned the government, pushing hard for higher CAFE standards for American auto manufacturers. Or seeking a repeal of the gas-guzzler tax breaks which insanely rewarded purchasers of truck-sized SUVs with accelerated depreciation while enacting enhanced tax credits for high-mpg cars. Or proposing revitalization of America's 177,000 miles of railroad right-of-way (ROW) by proposing mass electrification of freight and passenger lines powered by alternative energy. Man, imagine that! Exciting, huh? What you can do, see, is double up on the ROW (avoiding delays and freight-passenger conflict, as we have now) and then use the corridors themselves for electrical transmission lines, all powered by vast solar arrays and wind energy where conditions are favorable. We don't need to move to high speed rail right away, not yet, just inject lots of money into the rail system, which is so frigging energy-efficient. Creating millions of jobs, tons of high-tech work, transformative research.

Instead of, you know, doing what you did, Bush, and starving Amtrak from the very first days of your administration. Refusing to give it $2 billion as its new CEO requested in order just to bring passenger service up to First World standards. Nah, you'd rather spend ten or twelve billion a month in Iraq. In Iraq. So when Barack Obama gave that speech yesterday right after you finished and talked about the squandering of hundreds of billions of dollars on an unnecessary war against a country with no connection to terrorism, with no connection to any American interest whatsoever except our squandered effort to grab those hydrocarbons you're now so dismissive of -- well, you see -- you got spanked. Because there's no real answer to what Barack is saying, not if you're intellectually honest, too.

History did not actually start yesterday. The President attempts to avoid all blame for the country's predicament by pretending that his very first responsibility as President, the ordering of national priorities, is not in his job description. It doesn't work that way. In modern times, I do not expect a president, any president, actually to be versed in the arcane and sophisticated detail of every scientific, legal and economic discipline which is involved in making decisions. That's impossible and probably not even desirable. But a president does have the responsibility to figure out which few of the thousands of things the government might do with the limited resources at its disposal are actually in the national interest, and to make decisions accordingly. It does not satisfy the criteria of effective job performance to become bogged down in a marginal project somewhere in the Middle East and to spend all your money, and all your time and attention, on this one dumb idea, mainly for the purpose of vindicating yourself politically (while young men die), and to obstinately refuse to admit that it isn't worth it, that it's a mistake, that it's a classic tar baby of throwing more and more good money after bad, and that the country is suffering hugely as a result of this misallocation and colossal misjudgment.

That is Bush's legacy, and it is way too late to change it. My true sense about him is that he allowed his presidency to be hijacked by a group of dedicated ideologues, led by Dick Cheney, who are fundamentally uninterested in what you might call everyday American life. Behind every scandal plaguing the Bush years, you will find them lurking - illegal spying, torture, Valerie Plame, destroyed e-mails, defiance of Congressional subpoenas, and war, war and more war. For all his bluster and feigned overconfidence, I think Bush is a very insecure and fundamentally weak man who allowed a cynical and ruthless cabal bent on military adventures and arrogation of power to achieve a coup d'etat, and it is his weakness that has been our undoing, and his own.