By Denis Campbell
Dear Mr. Bush:
Five and a half days. Leave the football in its briefcase and lock it, ignore Ahmedinejad and Kim Jong Il, lock Dick Cheney in his office’s man-sized safe and resist the urge to engage us any further than your farewell speech Thursday night. Make no more appointments to lifetime positions, say sayonara to your Cabinet (17 of 24 who will leave government service to immediately accept senior positions to lobby the very agencies they once led). Just toddle around the 132-room mansion, say goodbye to the chef, the staff, talk to Lincoln’s portrait (although Herbert Hoover’s is more likely to listen and empathise) and begin your book.
The nation and the world have Bush fatigue that dwarfs our economic anxiety and bailout fatigue. Even your secretive, but vaunted internal legacy polishing November Team of SPINmeisters (Rove, Hughes, Fleischer et al) slipped out of the West Wing long ago without a trace. The legacy show tour closed on the road in Baghdad with the shoes and you know it. End all attempts at your insistent denial legacy revision tour and face the facts, your 8-years are an utter failure and any illusion you have of walking out with your head held high should be dismissed with all due hate.
As an American living abroad the last 11-years, I’ve heard and felt the affects of your ‘legacy’ first hand. The roll call of events would fill more space then I have here and it would be most helpful if there was an ounce of contrition somewhere inside your being. Your performance during the final press conference and Cabinet meeting is being called “vintage Bush” by most members of the media: at times angry, forceful, unapologetic and mostly completely filled with bushel-basket loads of denial.
You claim the US is terrorist attack free and how much of that is luck, just dumb luck? Your legacy of war was based on a lie. You sir, are a liar as are your people. And now you have disgraced our global legacy as the last great hope for the rule of law and decency with countless examples of rendition and torture to the point where your wing-nut followers compare you and your legacy to a televised fictional character on the show 24 ?!?
How you made it into your 60s without an ounce of self-responsibility, sensory acuity, self-analysis or critical thought is beyond us. We expect politicians to be somewhat beholden to special interests, it’s in the DNA of the system and yet we wonder how you sleep at night knowing the sunset regulations you just passed will allow your energy buddies to foul the environment, your pals benefited mightily from contracts around this war, 44-million of your fellow citizens have no health coverage, trillions of dollars have been lost from the retirement accounts of hard working Americans, millions have lost the value of their home and indeed their home to foreclosure, their jobs forever and bankruptcy laws you changed to favour your banking buddies mean there is not even a fresh start for those making that difficult decisions.
I tried to imagine the reaction of those people every time you lifted your shoulders with that nonchalant, “what do you want me to do about it?” shrug. Having lived in The Netherlands for six years I saw it often enough on shop floors. The national smile and shrug system is barely tolerable in a retail establishment, it is beyond the pale in a national leader.
This time your own words are what we will end with:
- On Iraq… why haven’t we achieved peace … will this ever happen? I think it will. And I know we have advanced the process.
- The Republican Party… This party will come back. But the party’s message has got to be that different points of view are included in the party.
- Economy… look, I inherited a recession, I am ending on a recession … The question facing a President is not when the problem started, but what did you do about it when you recognized the problem.
- Hostility towards him… And so, I view those who get angry and yell and say bad things and, you know, all that kind of stuff, it’s just a very few people in the country. I don’t know why they get angry. I don’t know why they get hostile.
- Mistakes?… Clearly putting a “Mission Accomplished” on a aircraft carrier was a mistake … Obviously, some of my rhetoric has been a mistake.
- Disappointments?… Abu Ghraib obviously was a huge disappointment during the presidency. Not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment. I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way.
- Standing in the world… It may be damaged amongst some of the elite … And some of them doesn’t like me, I understand that — some of the writers and the, you know, opiners and all that.
- Presidency the “loneliest office in the world”?… No, not for me … I had a fabulous team around me … and we had fun. I tell people that, you know, some days happy, some days not so happy, every day has been joyous … Even in the darkest moments of Iraq, you know, there was — and every day when I was reading the reports about soldiers losing their lives, no question there was a lot of emotion, but also
there was times where we could be light-hearted and support each other.
- Katrina… I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina — you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and — is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission … Could things have been done better? Absolutely. Absolutely. But when I hear people say, the federal response was slow, then what are they going to say to those chopper drivers, or the 30,000 that got pulled off the roofs?
- Rest of your life?… I don’t know … I just can’t envision myself, you know, the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt sitting on some beach … So — (laughter.) Particularly since I quit drinking.
In an other worldly 1-sentence translation of the press conference by the website Hoffmania: “It’s true. I really am a petulant, angry, stubborn little prick.”
Buh bye now.
