Thanks go to Frank Rich's column in the New York Times for the PDF. Whatever you think of Rich, he's a good writer. In a piece titled A President Forgotten but Not Gone, Rich tears into George W. Bush as an ineffective failure, whose only worth to history is the amount of time it takes to say, "sucked." Note the lack of an exclamation point. In Rich's view, the Bush administration isn't even worth getting excited about.Rereading that paragraph, I'm probably doing Rich a disservice. He's not really saying that Bush should be a forgotten man, just that -- at this point in history -- Bush is a forgotten man. And our amnesia is self-inflicted; we're so tired of the man that we're all willing to pretend he never existed. There was no Bush, there is only Obama.
I can't help it, I've got to give you a bit of Rich's column:
The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement -- as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.
Bush was supposed to be the Second Coming of Reagan. And he was. Only without all the leadership. Bush was never a man, but a committee -- he was Reagan's team without the captain. Dick Cheney and the rest of the neocons put together their Dream Team and that team didn't actually have a coach. The Bush administration was an experiment to determine whether the Executive branch could operate without an Executive.
Turns out it can't... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
