As much as I detest W and wish he had either
a) choked to death on that pretzel
b) been crushed in a horrible auto accident in his DUI days
c) been court martialled for going AWOL
d) gotten ahold of some bad cocaine and fried his brain
I’ll say nonetheless that I think he may not be a bad person and he MIGHT have had the ability to be a good leader. I think he might be smarter than he lets on (I’ve read that the aw shucks persona coupled with the mangling of the English language is indeed a ruse meant to help him connect with the regular man), and I think that he posesses one quality that all Presidents should…he is headstrong in his convictions.
Where I think his biggest mistake happened was in deciding that his administration was going to be closed off to any input from the outside world. It’s OK to be “the decider” if you are also the “informational gatherer” and “the considerer”, but Bush made a clear decision back when he was campaigning for the 2000 election to push forth with what he wanted to do, period.
This led to the take no prisoners and make no apologies attitude he took towards his campaign, from his decisions to use whatever leverage he could leading up to the election to make sure that Florida was in his pocket (see Choice Point technologies, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris and the US Supreme Court), to his rescinding all of the valuable consumer and environmental protections Clinton had put in place on Bush’s first day of office…and everything beyond. If he (or whomever was actually making these decisions) wanted it done, they did it. And thus, it was clear to many even before Bush was elected that he would eventually take us to war with Iraq to finish the job his father started (and also to avenge Saddam’s assassination attempt on his daddy and to fulfil the dream of the PNAC)...we heard tell that in 2002 Condi Rice brought up Saddam in a staff meeting and Bush dismissed her by saying “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” We know that when Joe Wilson brought evidence to the White House that the Nigerian Yellowcake Uranium story was false (which should have been obvious if one had even looked at the signatures to see the wrong President had supposedly signed it), instead of listening the a) outed his wife as a CIA operative and b) repeated the lie in a televised State of the Union address. We have read that Cheney assured Dick Armey that they KNEW Saddam had a miniaturized nuclear weapon (aka a suitcase nuke), which was what got him to recommend to Congress that we go to war. We have heard how Rumsfeld ordered intelligence officials to find a link between Iraq and 9/11 even after it had been clear we should have been going to Afghanistan.
And the big problem as I see it wasn’t that Bush was resolute in his ideas that we have to do what we have to do, but that he became convinced that we have to do x, without listening to or even seeking out any data to support this foregone conclusion…not only that, but the administration actively ignored anything that didn’t fit with their case. THAT was the big mistake he made. This echo chamber mentality, eminating from the top down, corrupted any sense of diversity of opinion as well.
Bush, as part of Karl Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” strategy, embarked on a mission to install as many conservative “strict constructionist” judges as possible (even if it meant illegally firing federal judges for not playing ball). Bush somehow got the Republican controlled Congress to vote lock step with every single thing he wanted to do for 4 years, with almost zero dissent. Essentially, Bush got control of all three branches of government, and then set an agenda based solely on ideology and not at all on objective review (much less debate) of evidence, damn the consequences. And when that wasn’t enough, he simply decreed things if he could not get Congress to go his way…the power of both the Presidency (via signing statements) and the Vice Presidency were greatly expanded and essentially of every single thing Bush wanted to do, he only failed on one thing, and thank our lucky stars he did….Social Security privatization (I shudder to think how bad things would be if people had been allowed to invest part of their retirement when the Dow was over 14k).
So yes, we can say he did a lot of stupid things…but every single stupid decision, every wrongheaded move, every single thing he did as President, where it turned out to be bad, was the result of one stupid decision early on…the decision to not listen to anyone who disagreed with him. I sense in him at least SOME level of humanity, and I think that if he’d been open to debate about the consequences of going in the direction he wanted to go, if he’d been willing and able to defer to the opinions of others who are learned and experienced, he MIGHT have been able to say, “OK, here’s my objective, how do YOU propose we get there,” and ideas could have flowed and hey, maybe he’s have had one to pick that didn’t cause quite so many problems.
And re: jbfletcherfan’s comment, I don’t disagree that the Presidency is a hard job, but as Americans, this is OUR government, and if we don’t see it being run in a way that we think is appropriate, we have every right to criticize the President for it, and you have every right to defend him. But what I think makes your perspective about people just jumping on the Bush bashing bandwagon a bit off is that many of us have shown superior judgement to Bush in that we have the moral high ground of being able to say that before he ever did many of these things, we were screaming at the top of our lungs trying to stop him, and he never listened to a huge chorus of voices, and did what he wanted to do anyway. That doesn’t mean that everyone who has enough common sense to say “I told you so,” is cut out then to run for President. Indeed, we have gotten off our asses and elected a progressive President who we believe will do exactly what Bush did NOT, which is to gather data, analyse it and THEN make an INFORMED decision. So, defend him is you must, but don’t even think we don’t have a right or indeed a responsiblity to be critical of Bush’s many mistakes.
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