by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - November 12, 2008
“Say something nice about George Bush?!?” Are you mad? Well, on the Op-Ed pages of The New
York Times Nov. 2, 2008, six contributors were asked to respond to the
question "What Will I
Miss About President Bush.” I have just added a bit of reality to each comment.
Plus a further thought at the end of this column.
As The Times said, "The Op-Ed editors asked six
writers to reflect on what they have most admired about him." The comments
were thus generally encomiums of one sort or another. Although I hate, just hate, bringing facts into situations
such as this, especially when it involves right-wingers, who are so sensitive
to the introduction of facts into any discussion, I thought that a few comments
on the factual side might be in order.
ROBERT DRAPER, a correspondent for GQ and the author of Dead Certain: The
Presidency of George W. Bush said that Bush was "Loyal to a
Fault." Draper talked about the [fact-and-logic-challenged] Press
Secretary Dana Perino and other "current and former Bush staffers"
who "just loved the guy." Draper tells us, that "President Bush has paid a price for his human decency." I guess that
would come as something of a surprise to one of his (formerly) most loyal
employees, former press secretary Scott McClellan.
Apparently by inadvertence rather than any specific action (at least according
to Scott), Bush just left the poor old guy out to dry and did nothing to reel
him back in when he inadvertently got caught up in the Rove-Cheney-Libby
cover-up of their purposeful leak of the identity of Valerie Plame (Scott
McClellan, What Happened: Inside the White House and Washington's Culture of
Deception, New York: Public Affairs, 2008, chaps. 1, 14). "Loyal to a
fault?" Well I guess it all depends upon how you define "loyal"
and "to a fault."
ARI FLEISCHER, the White House press secretary from 2001 to 2003 who preceded
McClellan (and who has not written a tell-all, or at least as much as he
apparently knows, book revealing one moral failing after another of George W.
Bush and the people with whom he surrounded himself) tells us that "I'll
miss President Bush's moral clarity. The president's critics hated his
willingness to label things right or wrong, and the press used to bang me
around for it, but history will show how right he was." That's right, Ari.
Bush sees things absolutely in black and white and furthermore he knows that he
knows which is which. He is indeed the right-winger's right
winger. Facts are totally irrelevant. As the journalist/author Ron
Suskind told us in a New York Times Magazine article published in the
run-up to the 2004 election, he was told by a White-House staffer that he
(Suskind) had better learn about the "alternate realities" they dealt
with if he ever wanted to understand them. And so, the warnings of the
impending al-Qaida attack on the US in the summer of 2001 were ignored, but as
soon as it happened, Bush made the determination to invade -- Iraq (McClellan,
chap. 8). Because he just knew what was right and what was wrong.
CURTIS SITTENFELD, the author of the novel "American Wife,"
apparently couldn't come up with anything nice to say about "W." but
he did go and on about Laura. He
described her, among other things, as a "well-mannered conservative." As compared with whom, Curt? George, Rove, or
"F__k you," "shoot-you-in-the-face" Cheney?
One wonders how JACOB WEISBERG, the editor in chief of the Slate Group and the
author of The Bush Tragedy was let onto the page when The Times was obviously trying to be nice, but he did share with us some of the great
Bush manglings of the language: "I know how hard it is to put food on your
family;” [immediately post-9/11] “I am here to make an announcement that this
Thursday, ticket counters and airplanes will fly out of Ronald Reagan Airport;”
[he wouldn't answer a question] “neither in French nor in English. Nor in
Mexican;” [and then] “misunderestimated, Kosovians, Grecians, Hispanically,
arbo-treeist, and strategery" (which happens to be a term coined by the
comedian Will Ferrell and adopted inside the administration). I don't know,
Jake. If you can't remember something nice about someone, why remember anything
at all?
SCOTT McCLELLAN, evidently trying to get back into Bush's good graces (goodness
gracious, some people just don't ever learn), said "What I will miss most about George W. Bush as president is his sincere
concern for promoting human dignity." There are two words that sum up the
Bush approach to that subject: Katrina and Torture.
Finally, PAUL BURKA, the senior executive editor of Texas Monthly said "I
feel nostalgic about the person I knew as Gov. George W. Bush. I miss that guy.
He was the best politician I ever saw. He really was 'a uniter, not a divider.'
He refused to kowtow to the far right. He worked with Democrats to strengthen
public education, while Republicans were pushing vouchers. He had four
vacancies on the Texas Supreme Court and he filled them all with centrist
judges. The extreme right wing of the Republican Party was his enemy, not his
ally. His administration was untainted by scandal. Karl Rove remained an
outside consultant rather than a gubernatorial staffer. But when he reached the
White House, Governor Bush vanished, to be replaced by President George W. Bush
-- a person I didn't recognize. He was never to return."
One has to give full credit (seriously) for such a statement. What Mr. Burka
did not note, however, are two things: A) observers have said that creating the
totally false "moderate" image for W. was all part of Rove's grand
plan to capture the Republican nomination and then the Presidency in 2000. B)
Regardless of whatever plans Rove and Bush had, the Texas governorship is acknowledged
to be one of the weakest, if not the weakest, in the country. In order to get
anything done that he or she (remembering the great Texas Gov. Anne Richards)
might have on the agenda or to create any sort of record that he/she might
someday want to show to outsiders, the Texas governor has to work closely with
the State legislature where the real executive power lies (yes, you read that
right; in Texas, the real executive power lies with the legislature -- but it
is Texas). And in those days, pre-Tom DeLay, the Democrats still had some real
power in the Texas legislature.
You can understand that there are some people who want to have nice memories of
George W. Bush. Hey, it is possible. You just have climb into the Georgite
alternate reality, and there they will be.
What will I miss
about George Bush? The
oh-so-plentiful grist he gave to my “let’s develop a real, effective
anti-Republican politics” mill over the years. This is a topic to which I will be returning more than once
over the coming months on TPJmagazine. But he has left one legacy to the Republican Party that we should note
with care, now. That is how
Republican campaigns will likely be run for the foreseeable future.
In his Nov. 4, 2008 column for BuzzFlash, the brilliant P.M. Carpenter
has this to say: “Farewell,
Messrs. Bush and McCain, It's Been Horrifying. But what could be more fitting than the dramatically
disparate ways in which these two campaigns wound down. For Obama, all the talk
was about lifting the middle class, restoring a sense of responsible order and
bringing at least one insane war to a rational end. Simple, consistent, and
thoughtful. For McCain, all the talk was still anyone's guess.”
As I said in a note to Phil (with whom I rarely disagree): “On
the last day I think that McCain's message was very clear: hate, fear, suppress
the vote; "its' all the media's fault;" the hoary old red-baiting,
covert Nixonian-Southern-Strategy racism; guilt-by-association; Big Lie Technique;
misrepresentation (see the last minute “Obama and coal thing); "Win in
Iraq and Afghanistan (and Viet Nam too while we're at it);" the hoary old
"tax and spend Democrats" while at the same time using
Democratic language in an attempt to fool as many of their potential voters as
possible that they too could do just what the Democrats promise but for FREE; intentional confusion of the message so as to get their voters to vote with their hating
and fearful, not their rational, selves; and finally, "vote for me and you
will get her before my term is up --- ain't she great?" BushRove actually started out in 2000
talking about (even though they didn’t mean it for a second) things like
“compassionate conservatism.” But
this is to where their politics have lead the GOP. For the foreseeable future this is where its candidates will
be trapped. If the Democrats can
build upon Obama’s apparent success in dealing with it, they could be in power
for a very long time. 
This column is based in part on “Dr. J.'s
Commentary: What Certain Folks Will Miss About George Bush” that appeared on BuzzFlash on Tue, 11/04/2008.