Monday, January 19, 2009

Delusional groupies

One of the many, many things I won’t miss about this administration is the flurry of “Oh, my gosh, Bush was such a good leader, don’t you remember?” screeds that have been raining down like the unfortunate result of a flock of geese who have been dosed with caffeine and laxatives. Bush has been the lead goose of the bunch, but since he’s being largely ignored at this point, it’s started to fall to other columnists, and their versions aren’t any more appetizing or convincing.

Take today’s column by Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle. She starts with this:

From the day President Bush took office, the long knives were out for him—in ways they will not (and should not) be out for President-elect Barack Obama. The chattering class saw Dubya as a walking style crime in a cowboy suit. They hit Bush for everything—for the way he mangled syntax, for the books he read and because he worked out too much.

Note that now that the buff Obama is taking office, stories gushing about Obama’s daily workouts flood the channels. Oh, yes, and the same people who belittled Bush for sending troops to war even though he only served in the National Guard somehow do not seem to notice Obama’s utter lack of military experience. . . .

Now, I’m not sure what Saunders has been taking to relieve the headaches from what is obviously a severe brain aneurysm, but “the long knives” were nowhere in evidence when Bush took office. Sure, the Florida debacle certainly started things off on an awkward foot, but the “long knives”—where were they? When Bush was elected, the Democratic Party was still in Ultra-Wuss mode. It was clear to most of us that Bush left something to be desired in the intelligence department, but he wasn’t entirely loathable when he took office.

I don’t think Bush was ever “hit” for “working out too much.” On the other hand, I think he was legitimately criticized for taking so much vacation time. Nobody cared that he cleared brush at his ranch; people cared because he spent 490 days at his ranch during the course of his presidency, taking vacations in the middle of crises (Hurricane Katrina, the war in Georgia, and most recently during the Israeli incursion into Gaza).

Think about that: 490 days in eight years. That’s fifteen months spent at the ranch. Another 487 days were spent at Camp David, which he travelled to 149 times during his two terms. That makes two years and eight months of vacation time, or about three months of every year of his presidency. People didn’t care whether he was physically fit for the job; people were concerned about the amount of attention he was paying to it.

Did anyone trash Bush for sending troops to war even though he only served in the National Guard? I don’t recall this happening. It doesn’t seem to me that military experience is necessary to be the President. What I do recall is that there remain a number of questions about the timing and diligence GWB gave to his abbreviated National Guard career.

Most of the Democratic candidates for president in 2004 and 2008 voted for the Patriot Act—and then campaigned against it. They voted for the resolution authorizing US military force in Iraq—then bolted from the war itself. Likewise with No Child Left Behind. Somehow Bush was the guy who looked bad as he withstood the heat while his caving critics preened.

This is largely true (though I take exception at the phrase “while his caving critics preened,” which is an insulting distortion of what was happening). What Saunders doesn’t seem to understand is that when each of these were proposed as legitimate programs, people voted for them. When these programs were abused and/or mismanaged into ineffectiveness and chaos, those who voted for these programs came to regret them. The reason Bush looked bad is because he was the guy in charge, they were his proposals, and he was doing a very bad job. The Patriot Act led to abuses on civil liberties, and did little to protect the nation. The Iraq War has been mismanaged, and it turned out that the rationale for it was based on falsehoods that the administration was knowingly promulgating. No Child Left Behind has been pretty much a disaster. Yet Saunders is mystified how Bush was the guy who looked bad.

When the Dems were pushing for a humiliating retreat from Iraq and opinion polls supported troop withdrawal, Bush instead pushed for a troop surge that has made all the difference. Vice President-elect Joe Biden—who voted for the war before he was against it—visited Iraq last week. While there, he promised the Iraqis that America would not withdraw troops in a way that undermines Iraqi security. Yet that was exactly what his party advocated a year ago.

Does Bush get any credit? No, just as he has received little credit for efforts that have prolonged millions of lives, thanks to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Forget considerable goodwill in India and Africa. His good deeds, you see, don’t fit with the prescribed story line that, with Bush in charge, the rest of the world hates us.

Saunders’s distortion field is just warming up now. First, the Democrats never advocated a “humiliating retreat,” and to seriously suggest this implies a level of Unfortunate Coulterism that immediately should put any thinking American on guard. The Democrats wanted a sane withdrawl; this is not the same thing. Nor did the Democratic Party advocate withdrawing troops in a way that would undermine Iraqi security. First off, Iraq is not secure. The surge has improved the statistics, certainly, but “secure” means nothing to the fourteen American soldiers (and two UK soldiers) who died last month in Iraq, or the eight Americans who died this month (the most recent being yestrday, in Baghdad, due to an IED). A total of 4,229 American military personnel have died in Iraq in this war so far, a war which was intended to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons development program—a program which didn’t exist in any viable capacity, in spite of the falsehoods promoted by the Bush administration—and to eliminate an ally to al Qaeda, which turned out not to be true, either.

And let’s talk about PEPFAR, which the Bush groupies have been yodeling about for the last few weeks. For at least the first three years of the program, only 11% of the program’s medication procurement allotment went to generic AIDS medications; the other 89% went to more expensive brand-name drugs. This violated the program’s policy to “provide drugs at the lowest possible cost, regardless of origin, as long as the safety, efficacy, and quality of the drugs can be assured.” At the time, over twenty generic medications had been approved by the FDA for PEPFAR—all but one manufactured by firms outside the US, and all cheaper than the brand-name drugs. Generic AIDS medications cost 10–20% what the brand name medications cost, which means that if that 89% had been spent on cost-effective generics, the people that could have been properly medicated would have increased by nearly 600%.

So there was a certain amount of mismanagement. More troublesome was that there was an emphasis on abstinence-only programs (which have been found to be largely ineffective), and little in the way of condom distribution and needle exchange programs (which have been repeatedly shown to reduce the spread of HIV). Nearly 25% of the PEPFAR partner organizations were faith-based groups, which was of concern due to the interference of evangelistic agendas, and that percentage has continued to increase over the course of the program.

One wonders how many more cases could have been prevented, and how many cases could have been treated properly, if the administration had pursued cost-effective medications earlier, and hadn’t put so much of an emphasis on ineffective strategies. Nobody is denying that PEPFAR has done some good, but a lot of people realize that it could have done a lot better.

Saunders does get slightly honest for a moment, however:

Yes, the man also stumbled, and others paid for his mistakes more dearly than he has.

Under Bush’s watch, Osama bin Laden evaded capture.

Worse, Bush’s slowness in changing strategies in Iraq suggested a presidency in a fetal position when Bush should have been managing the store and demanding results.

Weapons of mass destruction? The CIA believed Saddam Hussein had them.

So did Hussein’s lieutenants. I did, too. The conventional wisdom was wrong, but Bush can take comfort in the knowledge that without his efforts, Hussein almost certainly would have outlasted UN sanctions, armed himself to the hilt and wreaked unknown havoc in and beyond Iraq.

There is no comfort—there is no upside—to be had in the $810 billion Bush bailout. The Bush administration should have been on alert to contain the damage from the housing-price drop and mortgage foreclosures; instead, it allowed the credit crunch to reach a tipping point and roll over the US economy. It was so avoidable. It was like the Katrina trailers all over again—except this preventable and unnatural disaster left toxic trailers strewn across America.

There’s an out-to-lunch sloppiness to the whole mess. It feels as if the barrage of criticism made the Bush engine seize up and stop running the business of the nation.

Oops. There’s that distortion field again. The barrage of criticism isn’t what made the “Bush engine” seize up—it was Bush himself, and he continues to be properly criticized for the extreme incompetence of his administration. Take for example the alleged WMD. The CIA didn’t believe that Hussein had WMD; that view was pushed by the administration itself in spite of the available intelligence. Hussein hadn’t outlasted UN sanctions at all; the weapons programs he’d once had were in utter disarray, thanks to both the sanctions and the weapons inspections, in spite of the Iraqi government’s interference.

She’s right about the bailout, though. The only saving grace to it is that it is (I pray) a temporary measure—and that it will be managed by a more competent presidency.

America’s first MBA president turned out to be a poor administrator, more interested in ideas than making the machinery work. He was good at fighting—and winning—ideological battles in Congress, but he never demonstrated a commitment to making his own administration deliver as promised. In putting loyalty at a premium, he overlooked incompetence.

If you had bothered to look at his business record, Miss Saunders, you might have been able to predict his administrative expertise. Between Arbusto, Spectrum 7 (which bought Arbusto) and Harken Energy (which bought Bush’s Spectrum 7 shares and hired him as a consultant and director), he conducted himself poorly, and probably illegally; GWB sold Harken stock while serving as a director of Harken at least four times, almost certainly violating federal securities laws. Details are sketchy, in large part because Bush stonewalled all efforts to find out more about the Harken deal.

Also, it wasn’t hard to fight—and win—ideological battles in a Republican-controlled Congress. Things got a bit harder in 2006.

How will history judge Bush?

Osama bin Laden once told Time magazine that the US withdrawal from Somalia after the murder of 18 US troops on a humanitarian mission made him realize “more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.” Members of al-Qaida have told intelligence officials they never thought Washington would respond to the 9/11 attacks as ferociously as Bush responded. They expected a few bombs to be dropped, no boots on the ground, a swift withdrawal if casualties mounted—the usual short-attention span foreign policy that warped Lebanon, the Persian Gulf War, Somalia, the African embassy bombings and the attack on the destroyer Cole.

Bush showed America’s enemies a country that does not retreat in fear, does not bomb with impunity, and most important, does not desert civilians or foreign governments that trust us. If you think that doesn’t matter, look at Libya, which disarmed its weapons program. And see how much easier Obama’s presidency will be because Bush kept the faith.

Osama bin Laden may live, most likely quivering in a cave. And no one thinks America is a paper tiger anymore.

It bears mentioning that bin Laden was wrong: the American soldier has never been a “paper tiger,” nor tends to “run in defeat.” A more rational thought (as though bin Laden had many of those) would have been “America prefers not to be at war”; instead, bin Laden decided that the US military was weak. But then, bin Laden is not exactly a mental giant.

Unfortunately, during the Bush administration, the US military was weakened considerably; the broad lack of support for the military (whether at Walter Reed, or with regards to body and vehicle armor, or by handing out no-bid contracts to Halliburton and KBR who went on to defraud the government and still haven’t been prosecuted for that) hampered operations and did a disservice to those who put themselves in harm’s way.

Bush showed America’s enemies a country that lies, tortures, pursues wrong-headed policies to the point of destruction, disdains criticism, disdains common sense, and disdains the very civilians that you claim it doesn’t desert. In the process, it angered millions across the globe, and gave terrorists their best recruiting tool ever. It diminished America’s security and standing in the world, while gutting its economic and constitutional securities at home.

Ooo. And Libya disarmed its weapons program. So? North Korea has weaponized enough nuclear material for six bombs—on Bush’s watch.

Obama’s presidency, thanks to Bush’s incompetence, will be much harder. The need for a crippling intervention will tie up much of our budget, already crippled due to the doubling of the national debt under Bush’s irresponsible watch. We are considerably worse off.

Thankfully, tomorrow, that nightmare will be over. We just have to overcome the aftermath.

Another bizarre column was penned by Tara Wall, deputy editor of the Washington Times; before that, she was a senior adviser for the RNC and served in the Bush administration. With that record, it’s unsurprising that Wall is another Bush groupie who feels that Bush will eventually be vindicated. I won’t go into her column in detail, but there were some particularly brain-wrenching lines in it:

While sitting in the Oval Office with the 43rd president, for what was his last official week in office last Thursday, I got the sense that he feels he will be vindicated [ . . . for] what matters most in his eyes—protecting the homeland. “History will eventually see . . . that not only was it necessary to take the steps I took, but [they] led to a better world,” the president told me.

First, that Bush is entirely delusional in this regard is well established; that Wall has decided that his record will be vindicated as well shows an equal level of delusion, which is supported by the rest of the column.

Not only have I counted it an honor and a privilege to serve the 43rd president, but I have always had a deep respect for him as a person of faith, his strident conviction in doing what was right for the country and his commitment to closing the disparities that exist between black and white Americans—no matter the mistakes made and lessons learned. Above all, it is his dignity and civility that stand out to me most.

Dignity?

Civility?

Clearly, Wall hasn’t been paying attention. Dignity is not what Bush is known for. Nor is civility. He may be fine to hang out with, but as his 2000 campaign showed, “civil” was not one of his strong points, thanks in large part to his continued approval of Karl Rove’s tactics.

The legacy Bush leaves behind [ . . . ] will be better than that of his predecessor. Bill Clinton may have been popular, but his moral failings brought shame on the office of the presidency and tainted the people’s house.

That will forever be a stain on Clinton’s legacy. Not to mention, there was no such “civility” or “cooperation” when Clinton turned the keys over to Bush. I prefer principle over popularity any day.

Yes, yes, yes: Clinton fooled around with an intern, and then perjured himself.

Let’s compare.

Bush lied to the American people to justify a war that turned out to be protracted and ineffectual, pursued policies that violated international agreements and human decency, tortured people, gutted his constitutional obligations, violated the rights of an unknown number of Americans, . . . shall I go on?

Nice use of the word “stain,” by the way. But the record shows that there was a civil and cooperative turnover at the beginning of Bush’s presidency. Bush’s administration, on the other hand, was dismissive of what the Clinton team had to say, particularly with regards national security and terrorism.

And if you’re referring to the widespread reports of “vandalism” by outgoing Clinton staffers, the GAO “found no damage to the offices of the White House's East or West Wings or EOB” and Bush’s representatives admitted “there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration.” According to the GSA, “the condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy.”

The media reports, however, were fanned by the Bush administration, thanks to enigmatic remarks by Ari Fleischer, and remarks Bush staffers made to the press.

Yeah. Dignity. Civility. Principle. Care to rethink that, Ms. Wall?

Probably not your forté.

Wall’s final conclusion is that Bush “kept America safe,” and that is why he will eventually be vindicated.

Unfortunately, this assumes that he did. The evidence would indicate otherwise. America was never in greater peril with any other president. But then, no other president ignored so many facts and so much advice.

Thank goodness it’s nearly over. If only he had been thrown out of office earlier.