Broder: Bush's Worst Moral Failing Was...

No, you're not going to believe this.

In [Bush's] valedictory interview...I listened in vain for any admission of what I and others consider the greatest moral failing of the Bush presidency -- his refusal to ask any sacrifice from most of the American people when he put the nation on a wartime footing after the Sept. 11 attacks.

To Broder, that was a bigger moral failing than "Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo [and his response to] Hurricane Katrina and the neglect of the environment and the working class." And he doesn't even mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the past six years.

Who are these people - these "I and others" that Broder knows? What sort of Body Snatchers pods did they emerge from?

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head at the idea that someone like this has such a prominent role in our national discussion. The day when "Dean" Broder's too senile to string sentences together into the semblance of an op-ed column can't come too soon.

WaPo Likes Gerson Column So Much, It Runs It Twice

The Gerson column, "The Decency of George W. Bush," ran on the op-ed page on Wednesday, and again today.

Guess the WaPo really wanted to drive home the point that our Torturer-In-Chief, a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the exile of millions more, a President who used his office to gut both the Fourth Amendment and the age-old protections of habeas corpus, who turned the prosecutorial arm of the Federal government into the sort of partisan operation more typically associated with banana republics, is really a decent man.

That's quite an interesting definition of 'decency' they have.

Broder, Bush, and Katrina

Krugman resurrected this September 4, 2005 Broder column from the wastebasket of history, so I thought I'd just quote some of the good parts.

It took almost no time for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

All too true - just not exactly in the way Broder meant.

We cannot yet calculate the political fallout from Hurricane Katrina and its devastating human and economic consequences, but one thing seems certain: It makes the previous signs of political weakness for Bush, measured in record-low job approval ratings, instantly irrelevant and opens new opportunities for him to regain his standing with the public.

Well, that would be the important part, wouldn't it? The "devastating human and economic consequences" of Katrina, for Broder, are only the backdrop for what it might do for Bush's approval ratings.

Of course, Broder was just a wee bit off about that, too.

The challenges posed by this natural disaster are in some ways even more difficult than those of the terrorist attack, with anger and frustration now being expressed about the response of governments at all levels. But for a president who believes that actions speak louder than words, this is an advantageous setting.

'Nuff said.

Shorter Broder: Bush Beat McCain, Obama Did Nothing

It's easy for Broder to dump on Bush now, now that he's essentially irrelevant:

The public distemper with George Bush is so pervasive now that nearly all the candidates running on the Republican ticket -- not just McCain but senators and representatives who thought they were well ahead -- have seen their poll numbers turn sickly.

During the debate, when Obama accused McCain of offering nothing but a continuation of Bush's policies, McCain protested, "I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago. I'm going to give a new direction to this economy in this country."

But his protestations are in vain. So far as the voters I've interviewed are concerned, there has been only one economic policy for the past eight years, and it bears Bush's name. Even now, with the bankruptcy of that policy, the Republican White House is calling the signals.

It's a bit late to admit Bush's failings, old man. He's been a terrible President for seven years and nine months; you conveniently overlooked that fact until seeing it would show McCain in a better light, and Obama in a worse one:

Given the near-impossibility of McCain's position, Obama should be enjoying a near-waltz through every possible challenge.

And:

McCain's real opponents in this race are the economic collapse and the shattered political reputation Bush has inflicted on Republicans.

But Obama has done his part by avoiding any errors and presenting a minimal target to the opposition.

McCain's lost because he's been fighting against history. Obama's won by doing nothing. Just call him Fortinbras.

I think we've heard this meme before, but mostly from hacks like Gerson. Looks like Broder's finding his level.

In a fairly detailed look at Wednesday night's debate, Broder managed to say nothing about what was, for many commentators besides yours truly, the defining moment - the abortion discussion. How do you say:

Despite the fact that he was playing on the Democrats' turf, McCain made a spirited case for himself on all these subjects.

when McCain basically looked like he wanted to bite through somebody's jugular over the idea of a "health of the mother" exception to a late-term abortion ban? Yeah, it was 'spirited,' alright - in about the same way that Ozzy Osbourne biting the head off a bat was 'spirited.'

And the notion that Obama has an easy ride in this race? I don't think so. In order to win this thing, Obama still has to be the least angry, the least aggrieved, black man in America. Like Jackie Robinson in that first incredibly difficult season, he's had to maintain his composure at all times, under all circumstances. He makes it look so easy. But that doesn't mean it didn't take a lot of work to make that happen.

Gerson: Bush Is the Hero of the Banking Crisis

"The Leader Who Stood The Tallest." Words fail me, so I'll let Gerson speak for himself.

One advantage of a crisis is the illumination it sheds on the main figures of American politics -- like a strobe light on a dark dance floor, catching all involved in characteristic, sometimes embarrassing poses.

True dat.

[T]he largest figure revealed in the light of the financial crisis has been President Bush. Americans may be tired of strategic boldness, but Bush clearly is not. When Paulson and Bernanke came to the president in mid-September, warning of an imminent financial meltdown, Bush's reaction was typical. He told Paulson not to worry about the politics and to propose whatever was economically necessary. It would have been easier for the administration to produce symbolic, easily passable legislation. Bush chose to go to the root of the problem -- toxic debt in the financial system. The plan was not perfect and was later improved. But charges that it is somehow timid or irrelevant are absurd. Seven hundred billion dollars amounts to about 5 percent of all mortgage debt in America -- about one-third of all subprime debt.

Three things:

1) Just because it's big, doesn't mean it will accomplish its intended purpose. Ever hear of "throwing money at a problem," Mike?
2) "Bush" didn't choose anything. Bush has no idea what's going on here. All he's doing is trusting that what Paulson and Bernanke tell him is true.
3) All Bush has left is the hope that someday, history will evaluate him more kindly than the vast majority of people would do now. If the credit markets freeze up on his watch, despite Congress having passed whatever legislation he sent them, that would be one disaster too many: his reputation would never recover. Bush has little choice here but to do what the grownups tell him to do.

Bush's ambition, bias toward action and indifference to political pressure are sometimes criticized. But his greatest failures -- such as the Katrina response and the initial strategy of the Iraq counterinsurgency campaign -- have come when he ignored those instincts. The troop surge resulted when he followed them. And Bush's economic ideology -- a belief in markets, combined with a recognition that intervention is sometimes necessary to make markets work -- seems well suited to the current crisis.

Please. Bush's economic ideology - regulation is bad - got us into this. It wasn't all his fault - Phil Gramm laid most of the groundwork before Bush was inaugurated - but Bush has been President for nearly eight years. His crew didn't see this coming, didn't do anything to make this moment less likely, and did their best to cut regulation of the financial markets beyond the extent that it had already been done.

With months remaining in his term, Bush's influence is not what it once was. But if his rescue plan eventually passes, there will be reason for thanks that Bush, rather than McCain or Obama, is president at this moment -- even if few offer that thanks.

The bill that Paulson proposed was probably the worst possible bill that had a decent chance of at least being a temporary Band-Aid for our credit crisis. (Which is all I expect it to be, even in its final form.) Obama's economic team could have come up with something better in about five minutes - and that's got nothing to do with Obama personally. The same would be true of any credible Democrat's economic team, had they been President at this moment - Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Biden, either Clinton, Richardson, Dodd, you name it.

Maybe they could have even kept a crisis from happening in the first place, if they'd been President for the past few years. How you perform in a crisis is really quite secondary, if you were in a position to keep things from getting to a crisis stage to begin with, but didn't.

Bush: Right Down There With Nixon

For decades, 26% has been my gold standard for a President who'd lost the support of all but the hard core. This was Nixon's level of support throughout most of the Watergate year of 1974. Everybody in the world knew Nixon was lying and covering up, except for those Americans who clung to a state of denial due to party loyalty.

So when the three most recent polls all have Bush's approval rating at 26-27%, it's a landmark. Here's the polls, dates that they were in the field, and their Bush approval ratings:

USAT/Gallup - Sept 26-27 - 27%
CBS/NYT - Sept 21-24 - 26%
FOX - Sept 22-23 - 26%

Nixonian. In more ways than mere approval ratings.

Krauthammer On Bush's 'Equanimity'

Chuckles:

When I asked President Bush during an interview Monday to reflect on this oddity, he cast himself back to early 2001, recalling what he expected his presidency would be about: education reform, tax cuts and military transformation from a Cold War structure to a more mobile force adapted to smaller-scale 21st-century conflict.

But a wartime president he became. And that is how history will both remember and judge him.

Getting a jump on history, many books have already judged him. The latest by Bob Woodward describes the commander in chief as unusually aloof and detached. A more favorably inclined biographer might have called it equanimity.

In the hour I spent with the president (devoted mostly to foreign policy), that equanimity was everywhere in evidence -- not the resignation of a man in the twilight of his presidency but a sense of calm and confidence in eventual historical vindication.

So he's good at fooling himself, Chuckles.

Wouldn't it have been helpful of him to share this equanimity with the rest of us over the past several years? Instead, he's used the fear card over and over again to attain his political ends.

In doing so, he was not only an amoral political manipulator - he was Osama bin Laden's #1 ally.

The goal of terrorism, after all, is to terrorize. And Bush, by keeping the American people wound up about the terrorist threat for years, worked bin Laden's will.

By contrast, the Clinton Administration's concern about terrorism is clear in retrospect. But they fought their war behind the scenes. Their track record in fighting terrorism can be debated, but the American people weren't terrorized during Clinton's Presidency.

If the 1990s seemed like a "holiday from history" to you, Chuckles, it's because Clinton was doing his job.

It is precisely that quality that allowed him to order the surge in Iraq in the face of intense opposition from the political establishment (of both parties), the foreign policy establishment (led by the feckless Iraq Study Group), the military establishment (as chronicled by Woodward) and public opinion itself.

Or it might have just been that Bush himself had nothing to lose by rolling the dice one more time. Bush wasn't going to pay the price, in blood and treasure, of the escalation of the war. For him, it was a risk-free gamble: if the surge worked, he'd gain some vindication. If it didn't, he'd look little worse in the eyes of history than he otherwise would have.

And the argument over the surge still comes down to this: the Iraq War has been a freakin' disaster, for both America and Iraq. Mitigating somewhat the disaster you went out of your way to bring about (speaking of playing the fear card) isn't exactly something to brag about. It's saying to Iraq: we cut your arm off, but we finally managed to keep you from bleeding to death.

The surge then effected the most dramatic change in the fortunes of an American war since the summer of 1864.

So much for Normandy and Midway.

Besides, the reduction in violence in Iraq was mostly due to two things: (1) the Anbar Awakening, the fortunes of which are discussed on the DoD website as early as September 2006 - four months before Bush announced that the surge was coming; and (2) al-Sadr's cease-fire of August 2007, which, according to various news articles, owed its success to black-arts techniques (intelligence and special forces operations) that would have worked with or without the surge.

Besides, unlike Normandy and Midway, the surge has yet to accomplish its ultimate objective of political reconciliation. Even after two years of good behavior by the Anbar Awakening groups, Maliki still refuses to incorporate them into Iraq's security forces, and refuses to give the Sunnis any share of power in his government. Similarly, Maliki regards the Sadrists as military opponents to be crushed, rather than political adversaries to be negotiated with.

Absent a political reconciliation, Iraq's in trouble as soon as we pull out - so we've got to stay there indefinitely to prop up Maliki's tinhorn dictatorship.

The Union victories of the summer of 1864 led almost inevitably to the defeat of the Confederacy. Nothing like that can be said about the surge.

Krauthammer: 9/11 "Came Out Of the Blue"

For the past 150 years, most American war presidents -- most notably Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt -- have entered (or reentered) office knowing war was looming. Not so George W. Bush. Not so the war on terror. The 9/11 attacks literally came out of the blue.

Literally, but not figuratively, Chuckles.

Bush got that "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In U.S." PDB five weeks before 9/11, and told the briefer that he'd covered his ass, now he could run along. This was just weeks after Bush had attended a European summit at which there had been heightened concern about the possibility of a terrorist attack from the air.

OK, that was after Bush took office, if you want to nitpick, Chuckles. So, what warnings did Bush have as he took office in 2001?

The outgoing Clinton Administration did its best to warn the incoming Bushies that they should prepare to be focused on terrorism. The Bushies may not have wanted to hear it, but they were warned. They chose not to know.

And even before that, there had been the bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the fall of 2000, and of course the original attack on the World Trade Center towers in 1993. Plus there was a significant instance of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

These things were in the papers. We all knew about these attacks. And presumably Bush, during the transition, was briefed about attacks that had failed, such as the Millennium Bombing plot of 1999/2000.

Maybe Bush didn't see the approaching threat of terrorism. But that's not because the signs weren't there, or because he wasn't warned.

No, Chuckles, it was because Bush was a fucking idiot.

Bush: Not So Terrible As You Think

Or so say Fareed Zakaria, David Frum, and Robert Kagan, according to a blurb in today's Outlook section.

It's a shame there isn't some treacker of the Villager attitude towards Bush over the years. Because there's never been a point where they've said: yes, Bush really is a fuckup. Instead, they've managed to go from "he's not so bad" to "well, he was really bad, but he's not anymore" without ever having to say, "yeah, he's really a terrible President." Which he was, and is - and having done a few things right at the end doesn't change the reality that his Presidency has been a disaster, at home and abroad.

Take the Surge, which along with some purely Iraqi events has improved the security situation over there. The deliberately uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead are still dead; the millions of exiles are still exiled. It's good that things are better now, but that shoudn't get him off the hook.

I suppose we could say, "Good job, Bush - in the past year, you haven't caused any new foreign-policy disasters!" which would be grading on quite a curve right there, except that his overcommitment to Iraq meant that we had nothing left for any other international crisis, and Putin knew it.

McClatchy's Landay on the Georgian Conflict

While I'm highlighting articles on the Georgian mini-war, it would be a crime to skip past this article by Jonathan Landay of the excellent McClatchy chain, which illustrates the depth of the Bush Administration's strategic clusterfuck:

One problem in under-estimating the Russian response, another U.S. official said, was "a dearth of intelligence assets in the region."

U.S. "national technical means," the official name for spy satellites and other technology, are "pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan," the official said, and there was only limited monitoring of Russian military movements toward the Georgian border.

Additionally, the United States had lost access to vital information when Russia dropped out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty in December to protest U.S. plans to build missile defense sites in Europe.

Under the treaty, Russia had been required to exchange reports on troop, armor and aircraft deployments with the United States and other members on a monthly basis. But once Russia dropped out, that information was no longer available.

"I wouldn't say we were blind," the official said. "I would say that we mostly were focused elsewhere, unlike during the Cold War, when we'd see a single Soviet armor battalion move. So, yes, the size and scope of the Russian move has come as something of a surprise."

So: the Iraq war deprived us of the resources to deal with other potential conflicts, as we DFHs had been warning for years. And in this particular case, it's even worse: it deprived us of the resources to see what was coming.

Though as Landay points out, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty gave us another (if weaker and more intermittent) set of eyes to watch Russian troop movements with. But we decided we'd rather give Poland and the Czech Republic a somewhat porous missile defense than be able to see.

This is the Bush/neocon attitude towards the world: we can be as aggressive as we want - invade Iraq, rattle sabers at Iran, back out of a deal with North Korea, abrogate the ABM treaty with Russia, and put missiles in Poland - and none of it will have any consequences. Until it does.

Speaking of actions with consequences, as everyone now knows, we gave Saakashvili mixed messages. He evidently heard the part he wanted to hear, as people will. Giving him the slightest reason to believe we might help him out militarily in a pinch, in a time when we were already desperately scrounging for enough troops for Iraq, was absolutely crazy on our Administration's part.

Bush lavished praise on the U.S.-educated Georgian leader as a "beacon of democracy." He gave military training and equipment to Georgia, which supplied the third-largest contingent to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and had promised NATO membership, they said. He visited the country in 2005 and addressed a huge crowd from the same podium as Saakashvili.

"The Russians have clearly overreacted but President Saakashvili . . . for some reason seems to think he has a hall pass from this administration," said former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

And then there's the coup de grace. You know how, for neocons, the year is always 1938, and the place is always Munich? Well, guess who, under that characterization, got to play the Neville Chamberlain role in the current kerfluffle?

That's right: George W. Bush.

At the same time, U.S. officials said that they believed they had an understanding with Russia that any response to Georgian military action would be limited to South Ossetia.

"We knew they were going to go crack heads. We told them again and again not to do this," the State Department official said. "We thought we had an understanding with the Russians that any response would be South Ossetia-focused. Clearly it's not."

Remember all the shit Carter got for his "Brezhnev lied to me" remark, when Russia invaded Afghanistan? This is Bush's "Putin lied to me" moment.

And, even more icing on the cake: Bush promised humanitarian aid he couldn't deliver.

WASHINGTON — President Bush Wednesday promised that U.S. naval forces would deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Georgia before his administration had received approval from Turkey, which controls naval access to the Black Sea, or the Pentagon had planned a seaborne operation, U.S. officials said Thursday.

As of late Thursday, Ankara, a NATO ally, hadn't cleared any U.S. naval vessels to steam to Georgia through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the officials said. Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, countries must notify Turkey before sending warships through the straits.

Pentagon officials told McClatchy that they were increasingly dubious that any U.S. Navy vessels would join the aid operation, in large part because the U.S.-based hospital ships likely to go, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy, would take weeks to arrive.

"The president was writing checks to the Georgians without knowing what he had in the bank," said a senior administration official.

There comes a point at which you'd think even Bush's most diehard supporters have to admit he's a total fuckup. They won't, of course, but when you hit 'em with a bunch of stuff like this, all they can do is slink away or change the subject. How 'bout them Cubbies?

P.S. Here's the link to the main McClatchy news page. I recommend checking it at least once a day. They catch some good stories that the WaPo and the NY Times miss.

This Morning's Broder: an Op-Ed of Quiet Desperation

It must be hard, these days, to find something positive to say about George W. Bush. This morning, Broder demonstrates exactly how far one must reach to do so - and he's still completely wrong.

Broder approvingly quotes some bozo who praises Bush for his management skills. He's serious. For the rest of us, there's nothing to do but laugh. Hence the blog title. Let's roll tape:

One of the things Patterson teaches is that George Bush has been a more creative manager than is generally recognized.

I suppose that's one way to put it. Heckuva job, Brownie, Rummy, Gonzo!

Broder continues:

He has added three significant offices to the White House structure -- the Homeland Security Council, the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and the USA Freedom Corps.

Wow - Bush added some boxes to the White House org chart! How few Presidents must have ever done that before. Creativity in action!

According to Broder, Patterson "also credits Bush with improving the physical facilities of the White House in ways that will benefit the next presidents," such as the Situation Room and the Briefing Room.

That's great, but isn't there some Senior Executive Service-type person, several rungs down, who is in charge of the White House's and EOB's functions as office buildings? This isn't exactly Chief Executive stuff; this is more like Jimmy Carter approving the schedule for the White House tennis courts.

Broder then asks "[t]he obvious question []: If the presidency has been so well managed, how come so many things have gone awry?" and answers himself: "The choice of people and policies is a lot more crucial than tables of organization."

Well, yeah.

To summarize Broder:

1. Bush was a good manager.
2. Everything went wrong anyway.
3. Because Bush screwed up the big things about being a manager.

I'm not even going to try to square that triangle. How does anyone write stuff like this and not know how ridiculous he is? Sheesh.

And even more perennially perplexing, how does someone write stuff like this, and still get hailed as the 'Dean' of the Washington press corps? Only thing I can figure is, they've all had lobotomies.

As a coda, Broder manages a backhanded slap at Bill Clinton:

Patterson says there are lessons to be learned. One of the most important is to understand that "Cabinet government" is a myth. The big issues and the tough choices inevitably come to the White House, so it behooves a new president to spend more time and thought on his White House staff than on his Cabinet -- exactly the opposite of what Bill Clinton did.

I have no idea whether that's true, and I expect it depends a lot on what one means by "Cabinet government,' but those Cabinet secretaries happen to oversee a great deal. The big decisions get made in the White House, but the lesser decisions that determine whether government is actually effective mostly get made in the Cabinet agencies.

And you know what? The government worked when Clinton was President. And it's a total embarrassment under Bush.

But Bush was a good manager, and Clinton wasn't. Only in Broderland.


Addendum: Broder's column was titled, "Management 101 for Senators," based on the notion that U.S. Senators are crappy managers, and shouldn't really become Presidents. Wonder if he complained about that when Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford (former Representative, but why would they be any different?) were President?

At any rate, Obama's clearly demonstrated he can run an organization way larger than his Senate office. His campaign has been brilliant thus far, in execution as well as concept. Meanwhile, on the McCain side, they can't even keep straight whether or not McCain speaks for the McCain campaign with respect to tax proposals. If Broder's test is which candidate needs to take Management 101, there's only one right answer.