Juan Cole Says Bye To Bush: "In the end, he replaced being drunk on beer with being drunk on power"

[kpete]

Friday, January 16, 2009
W.'s Twilight: A Man of Feeble Temper

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There are weasels among the pundits who say that Bush has been vindicated, insofar as Iraq has regained better security than it had in 2006. This is like saying that the Norwegian brown rat was vindicated when the Black Death ran its course, having killed a third of Europe before it subsided.

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Bush lumbers off into his Houston gated community (until recently whites-only), having dropped the pretense of being a rancher who liked to "clear brush." He has enriched his cronies in the military-industrial complex, and opened Iraq to investment by US petroleum firms. But the US economy was hollowed out by an administration that did not believe in auditing the books or actually regulating businesses as the law requited. Bush was a socialist on military and security issues and an anarchist when it came to curbing the abuses of corporations or the white-tie superwealthy that he called his base.

Bush never escaped the habits of his ne'er-do-well undergraduate days at Yale. In the end, he replaced being drunk on beer with being drunk on power. He replaced wooing the women with wooing the corporations. He replaced frat boy hijinks with ruinous wars that wrought a devastation across the rugged expanse of West Asia unlike anything seen since the pagan Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258.

Our nation renews itself, and makes small revolutions with its political campaigns. We have the opportunity now, to choose truth over propaganda, responsibility over recklessness, compassion over brutality, altruism over self-interest, and ability over incompetence. We have the opportunity to repudiate the past 8 years, and to transcend them once and for all, to redeem ourselves as a nation. The persons we choose to serve us as first among equals in our republic can bring us shame or honor as a nation. But it is our choices as individuals that make us shameful or honorable in ourselves. We must never again allow a crew of crooked bullies to make us underlings, lest we be laid to rest in dishonorable graves.

lots, lots (I had a hard time editing) more at:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/ws-twilight-man-of-feeble-temper.html

[tigereye]

1. what was most astonishing (but strangely not surprising) was his last speech-

showing little, if any, insight, and a sad tendency toward minimizing any problem that had occurred, calling horrid events "disappointments." I really think the 911 set the tone for his "John Wayne- like" perception of events, the lonely gunslinger riding into the West, feeling as if he alone had done his best to save the town.


John Stewart said it better than I could in his show on Wednesday? night.

[Submariner]

2. I would like to think the entire Bush family gets to read this

and it makes Babs and Laura vomit. They deserve it for foisting this piece of crap on us.