The View From Bush's Dead End: Wondering how President Bush rationalizes his conviction that history will vindicate him? Washington Post opinion columnist Charles Krauthammer this morning offers insight into Bush's thinking -- and an extraordinary example of the contorted logic required to defend what ever-increasingly appears to have been a massively failed presidency.... [T]he president found an hour to talk to Krauthammer about his legacy on Monday. The columnist emerged with the following message: Bush is not aloof and detached, as observers such as author Bob Woodward would have you believe.
No, he is possessed of "equanimity."
"In the hour I spent with the president (devoted mostly to foreign policy), that equanimity was everywhere in evidence," Krauthammer writes, "not the resignation of a man in the twilight of his presidency but a sense of calm and confidence in eventual historical vindication." To support the argument for historical vindication, Krauthammer indulges in -- or perhaps more accurately, passes along -- one fallacy after another. The most outrageous is the assertion that going to war in Iraq... was not entirely the Bush administration's call.... [A] central point of the repeatedly validated Bush critique is that the president (either knowingly or cluelessly, we're still not quite sure) led a massive misinformation and exaggeration campaign that led the nation into supporting the war on false pretenses. That his propaganda campaign worked does not somehow allow Bush to evade his personal responsibility. Quite the contrary....
Krauthammer writes that Bush notes "with some pride" that "he is bequeathing to his successor the kinds of powers and institutions the next president will need to prevent further attack and successfully prosecute the long war." Those of course include the power to conduct surveillance without a warrant and torture terror suspects. Krauthammer then concludes by chanelling Bush's favorite, if widely disputed presidential analogy: "Bush is much like Truman.... Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration."...
With a more skeptical view of Bush's legacy, author Ron Suskind writes in Esquire: "George Walker Bush is not a stupid or a bad man. But in his conduct as president, he behaved stupidly and badly. He was constrained by neither the standards of conduct common to the average professional nor the Constitution. This was not ignorance but a willful rejection on Bush's part, in the service of streamlining White House decision-making, eliminating complexity, and shutting out dissenting voices. This insular mind-set was and is dangerous. Rigorous thinking and hard-won expertise are both very good things, and our government for the past eight years has routinely debased and mocked these virtues. President Bush was unmoved by any arguments that challenged his assumptions. Debate was silenced, expertise was punished, and diversity of opinion was anathema, so much so that his political opponents--other earnest Americans who want the best for their country--were, to him and his men, the moral equivalent of the enemy. It is important to note just how different such conduct has been from the conduct of other presidents from both parties. . . .
"[T]his ahistoric president seems to have never appreciated just how hard-won are the institutions of American liberty. Article II of the United States Constitution grants stunning power to the president, power almost beyond imagining to be entrusted to one man. But for George Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn't enough. And so, with a level of secrecy that betrayed a basic mistrust of the American people, they proceeded to expand the awesome power of the presidency and in the process upset the balance of powers designed by the founders. And in this, the president and vice-president found their greatest success. In fact, this presidency has succeeded spectacularly in the project that most mattered to Bush and Cheney, and that is putting the United States on a more authoritarian footing.
"And with our fear being very carefully managed by our national leaders, and with President Bush exploiting our darker instincts, we in the press, in the Congress, in the electorate generally, simply weren't vigilant enough. And that is perhaps the best lesson to take away from the presidency of George W. Bush..."
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