The End Is Near -- But Not Near Enough

Creature of journalistic habit that I am, I’ve long tried to look ahead and not back. It’s usually more interesting than writing about what most everyone else is writing about, and I occasionally stumble upon something that makes me seem positively prescient. (I’m not going to do that here, so you should feel free to skip this post.)

Anyhow, I find myself pondering the end of the Bush interregnum a lot these days. It is with some wonder and not a little trepidation that I consider what will it be like to not be “led” by this mediocrity after eight very long years, and most importantly, how much of the damage that he has wrought can be undone. Or more importantly, how much the next president will want to undo.

But try as I might, I still can’t fix my gaze on 2009 for very long because after six-plus years of the presidency of George Walker “GI at the G8” Bush I still have been unable to figure out how such a lightweight became president. (I know. He stole the election.) And then was re-elected. (I know. He scared the beejesus out of people and into voting for him.)

And yet despite a reign of error unpresidented . . . er, unprecedented in American history, I still do not have the capacity to actually hate the guy. (Are you reading this, Jason?) I am deeply aggrieved about what he has done to a country that I love deeply and have served in time of war even if his vice president has repeatedly called me a traitor. But hate? Nah.

Well, Frank Rich, the New York Times reliably trenchant lefty-liberal op-ed columnist, took me by the hand the other day and finally disconfused me about my own confusement:

"It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad."

Thanks, Frank.

So it wasn’t so complicated after all! The guy is a borderline cipher, an empty vessel into which every neocon gunslinger with an agenda poured his pet projects, which unfortunately happened to include a nasty little dust-up in Mesopotamia that has bled the U.S. of nearly 3,500 men and women, its treasury of nearly $400 billion and incredibly elevated Saddam Hussein to a martyrdom for many Iraqis that would have been unthinkable before the invasion.

This makes the caterwauling of the Republican elite over Bush pooping on their "real" conservative blankie so precious. Even more precious is their attempt to lock the door to the presidential kindergarten by claiming that their onetime hero — the man who puffed out his chest on the deck of an aircraft carrier four years ago and declared “Mission Accomplished” — has accomplished absolutely nothing of positive consequence and is not and has never been one of "them."

What are they gonna do? Run to Mommy (Karl Rove) or Daddy (Dick Cheney) and whine about George kicking sand in their faces at recess?

This is a story line that we will be hearing with increasing frequency from a field of mostly vapid Republican presidential wannabes (not that I think the Dems are a great improvement) who, confronted with the challenge of repudiating the boy-man but not his policies, exhibit little original thinking of their own beyond rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of a mess one of them hopes to inherit.

The end, you see, is near. But not near enough.