Mischief Accomplished

Tuesday night, Menckles and I had a short meeting at Johnny White's with the Right Reverend Evil Bob who is an acquaintance of ours we have hired to officiate a modest function we're planning in March. As is liable to happen this week, our conversation turned to the general relief we share with nearly 70% of the nation at the imminent conclusion of the Bush Administration.

As we left White's we walked by the bar next door which for a time in the late 90s and early 00s was called the Velvet Dog (now the Boondock Saint). Rudolph used to work there. This was where I came on the evening of (or was it the night after?) 9-11-2001 to bug Rudolph at work and to blow off steam imagining out loud all the horrible ways in which the Bush Administration would use the situation to make life miserable for Americans in the name of fighting terrorism. Mostly I was worried about increased surveillance, restriction of civil liberties, the sorts of things that eventually became the PATRIOT act and the Bush Administration's propensity for using the threat of terror as a cover for pushing an otherwise politically unpalatable right-wing economic agenda.

Now I'm a pessimistic guy with a fairly strong imagination. But even in my drunken grief over the terrorist attack and my utter lack of faith in the people who were charged with responding to the emergency, even I couldn't have predicted (nobody could have predicted) the scope of the arrogance, the stupidity, cruelty and corruption that would come to define the Bush II years in America. In that way, George W. Bush is something of a marvel. He and his people managed to fail even my dismal expectations. And that's about the best thing I can say about our outgoing President. Here are a few of my favorite retrospective comments published by others this week.

Juan Cole writes:

Bush was never more than a screw-up. He admitted when running for president that there were deficiencies in his knowledge and experience, but he said he would make up for that by appointing good people around him. It turns out that if someone doesn't have a lick of common sense, he won't even know which of his advisers is giving him wise counsel, and he sure as hell won't know how to appoint wise people to advise him in the first place. W. thought the trustworthy, competent people were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. He doesn't seem to have taken Colin Powell seriously, and the way he used and discarded Powell is yet another stain on his disastrous presidency.

W. had the gall to exploit people of color at his stage-managed farewell, even though his party is overwhelmingly White and he has driven people of color into much deeper poverty in contrast to Clinton, who raised the standard of living for the poor and actually enforced civil and voting rights. W. brought a native of New Orleans before the cameras last night, as though this gesture could erase his maddening unconcern toward the damage done one of the country's great cities by his own lackadaisical attitude.

Bush lumbers off into his Dallas 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 required. 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.

Schroeder inveighs:

You have betrayed New Orleans, and you have betrayed the promise you made to the American people.

You are an ass, George, and no one should ever forget it. No cowboy hats, or belt buckles, or swagger will ever mask the truth of your utter incompetence, your profound dumbassery, and your brutal carelessness.

May people spit upon your grave, and dogs piss on your tombstone, for all eternity, because you are, and will forever be, the WORST PRESIDENT EVER!

Good fucking riddance! You are a pathetic excuse for a human being.

Matt Taibbi has a mock exit interview with Bush in the current Rolling Stone some of which is online here.


Harper's published a list of statistics from the Bush years which captures the zeitgeist quite well. A few examples:

• Minimum number of Bush appointees who have regulated industries they used to represent as lobbyists: 98


• Number of members of the rock band Anthrax who said they hoarded Cipro so as to avoid an “ironic death”: 1


• Percentage of the amendments in the Bill of Rights that are violated by the USA PATRIOT Act, according to the ACLU: 50


• Number of all U.S. war veterans who have been denied Veterans Administration health care since 2003: 452,677


• Minimum number of times that Frederick Douglass was beaten in what is now Donald Rumsfeld’s vacation home: 25


• Seconds it took a Maryland consultant in 2004 to pick a Diebold voting machine’s lock and remove its memory card: 10


• Days after Hurricane Katrina hit that Cheney’s office ordered an electric company to restore power to two oil pipelines: 1


• Days after the hurricane that the White House authorized sending federal troops into New Orleans: 4

And finally here is James Gill in yesterday's T-P:

Students of the debacle now drawing to a merciful close said the widely circulated picture of Bush looking down on the flood zone marked the point of no return. His administration's mishandling of the Katrina response finally convinced the public that this presidency was an absolute flop, they say.

Bush himself evidently can't see it and held his press conference as a part of a doomed campaign to burnish his legacy. If he believes he can justify torture and all the other evils of his administration, perhaps it is not surprising that he can delude himself over Katrina.

The "school system is improving dramatically" in the flood zone, he observed at his press conference, although what he believes that has to do with him is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile, "people are beginning to move back into homes."

After three-and-a-half years, perhaps we can be forgiven if we aren't too impressed. Sure we feel bad about those nasty things we said. We were far too restrained.

Update: One more from David Rees