Daily Archives: January 10, 2009

“His was no ordinary failure”

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I take the quote in the title from an otherwise forgettable article by Jacob Weisberg on the failures of the Bush presidency. I’ll come back to it in a bit. First I want to skip to Frank Rich’s column, “Eight Years of Madoffs.”

THREE days after the world learned that $50 billion may have disappeared in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, The Times led its front page of Dec. 14 with the revelation of another $50 billion rip-off. This time the vanished loot belonged to American taxpayers. That was our collective contribution to the $117 billion spent (as of mid-2008) on Iraq reconstruction — a sinkhole of corruption, cronyism, incompetence and outright theft that epitomized Bush management at home and abroad.

Rich goes on from there to walk us through the outrages of the past eight years. As he says, after awhile there was no much outrage it rendered one catatonic. Then he writes,

While our new president indeed must move on and address the urgent crises that cannot wait, Bush administration malfeasance can’t be merely forgotten or finessed. A new Justice Department must enforce the law; Congress must press outstanding subpoenas to smoke out potential criminal activity; every legal effort must be made to stop what seems like a wholesale effort by the outgoing White House to withhold, hide and possibly destroy huge chunks of its electronic and paper trail. …

…But I would add that we need full disclosure of the more prosaic governmental corruption of the Bush years, too, for pragmatic domestic reasons. To make the policy decisions ahead of us in the economic meltdown, we must know what went wrong along the way in the executive and legislative branches alike.

Amen.

Jacob Weisberg wants to know what went wrong also, although his interest seems more theoretical than practical. And as Scott Lemieux says, wondering whether Bush himself was incompetent, or whether he surrounded himself with incompetent people and took their advice, is a distinction without a difference.

This paragraph made me want to smack Weisberg in the head:

Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?

The truth is, there is plenty of evidence the “successful moderate” enabled plenty of corruption and mishandling of funds while he was governor of Texas. Back in 2002 I cataloged much of it, although what I wrote in this article was only the tip of the iceberg. After listing several ways in which Bush had looted Texas, I wrote (IN AUGUST 2002!) “we must not permit the Bush Regime to continue to loot the wealth of America to benefit Bush’s friends.”

Most of the really bad corruption and incompetence hadn’t happened yet. I saw it in 2002. Weisberg hasn’t yet caught on.

Torture? You want to talk about Bush’s eagerness to execute people? His childhood delight in putting lighted firecrackers in frogs? I still get cold chills when I remember how he giggled when someone — I think it was Wolf Blitzer — asked him a question about executions during the 2000 campaign.

Weisberg still hasn’t caught on. He still hasn’t admitted to the fact that the American political system somehow put a sociopath into the Oval Office.

Bleatings

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Now some movement conservatives are angry with their former champion, Rick Santorum, because he said of Sarah Palin, “She doesn’t have a well-informed worldview.” The tribe is eating its own.

Writing about Palin’s most recent interview, David Frum said,

However nastily and treacherously Palin’s media handlers may have behaved after the election, their only error during the election was to offer too much access to Palin, not too little. Those handlers faced a daunting problem: Their party’s nominee for vice president could not respond to questions without embarrassing herself. The handlers who kept Pain under wraps knew what they were doing. Had Palin refused all interviews during the campaign, there would have been some criticism, but it would have been forgotten by now – and the Gibson and Couric interviews would not be filling YouTube, ready to be rebroadcast in 2012.

Frum was criticizing Palin’s media handlers, not the McCain campaign itself, but what does it say when the veep candidate has to be kept out of sight because she’s too much of a dolt to be let out in public? And, frankly, I don’t think the McCain campaign would have done any better if they’d kept Moosewoman in a closet.

Frum continues,

She tells us she was a victim of sexism. She tells us she was a victim of class prejudice. She complains about her media treatment – then insists she never watched any of it. She deplores the unpleasant personal comments directed against herself, while offering up some equally unpleasant personal comments of her own. She repeatedly shades the truth in order to escape blame for her own mistakes. (She won’t for example let go of our claim that there was some insult to Alaska embedded in Katie Couric’s simple question: “What do you read?”)

Frum says Palin needs to learn to let go of her grievances if she’s going to be a viable presidential candidate in the future. But Frum misunderstands his own people. Righties love her because she embodies grievance, because she gives voice to their Inner Victim. If she ever started to sound unselfish and mature, her fans would lose interest.