Reflections on George W. Bush, and some other hateful characters

When I was little one of my babysitters told me I shouldn’t use the word hate. “You don’t really hate that person,” she said.

This was pretty confusing, because although I was still trying to figure out what feelings were, it seemed to me that yes, I really did hate that person.

And they say you shouldn’t hate the person, just the actions of the person.

So I’ve been thinking lately about some people that I really do hate. I’ve never met them, of course, and if I did maybe I’d just hate their actions, not their persons, but tell me, babysitter: why shouldn’t I hate Karl Rove, or the Dick Cheney, or Sarah Palin, or George W. Bush?

The first two are very, very smart, and that’s a huge factor in the hate column. They are fully aware of how they manipulated, and continue to manipulate, all of us to serve their own power. If I met those two, I know for sure I’d hate them – inside and out.

Sarah Palin is clever, not smart. She’s clever enough to quit things while she’s still charming people and before she gets found out. She too manipulates people, but with her feminine wiles and folksy talk, not her intelligence. If I met her, she might charm me, but I’d be wary. She’s a mean girl, a bullying girl, but she might manage to suck me in. I hope I never meet her.

If you look at my little tag cloud over there on the right, you can see I’ve talked about George W. Bush a lot, nearly as often as Obama, which is kind of horrifying. He was my boogey man. I hated him fiercely when I started this blog, because we were still subjected to his incompetence.

But now I have a confession to make. If I met him, I feel quite sure I wouldn’t hate him. Yes, he left us with two wars and the biggest recession since the Depression and a screwed up financial system and unchecked global warming and Christian moles in most federal agencies (help, I’m talking myself back into hating him). But I believe he himself was manipulated, mostly by those two up there that I really hate. He’s a perfect example of the Peter Principle, but he’s not dumb, and I think he realizes this. Maybe this is why he’s been refreshingly quiet lately.

I hate his actions. If I met him, though, I’d have a beer with him.

The Worst Decade, Part 3: The Year 2002

The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.

- George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union Address

That’s how it started, and they worked on us for the rest of the year. It’s amazing, in retrospect, how carefully they manipulated us.

“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out,” said our brave leader to Condoleezza Rice in March.

Just before Memorial Day they warned us about potential terrorist scuba divers, and that the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, tall apartment buildings and subways might be targeted.

In July Richard Perle told us Iraq was a very rich country, and it could finance its own reconstruction. Bush gave General Franks $700 million for war preparations without telling Congress. And the now-famous Downing Street memo revealed that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made, and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

In August they created the White House Iraq Group. Its mission was to sell the war to the American public. Its bright lights included Karl Rove, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen J. Hadley, Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. But they waited till fall to do anything, heeding Andrew Card’s warning: “From a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Then there were the aluminum tubes; Condy’s mushroom-cloud smoking guns; Judy Miller’s stories in the New York Times; the terror alerts getting redder and redder; Cheney ordering the CIA around with his deep scary voice; and Rumsfeld describing Saddam’s huge piles of destructive stuff, while at the same time telling us the war wouldn’t last any longer than five months and signing off on torture (even though we’d been torturing all year).

The Iraq Group had done its job well. In October Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize the war. Only 33 senators and 133 house members were opposed.

Bush told us war was his last, not his first choice, and ended the year by saying to a reporter at a press conference:

“You said we’re headed to war in Iraq – I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war in Iraq. I’m the person who gets to decide, not you.”

How did we manage to survive that year? And, worst of all, I barely remembered all that. I think they drugged me.

The Worst Decade, Part 2: The Year 2001

We were like stuffed geese that year, fat and unhappy with right wing values, environmental destruction, and massive tax cuts forced down our throats.

Little did we know how much worse things could get. Little did we know that the scared little boy reading The Pet Goat had, one month earlier, contemptuously dismissed the CIA agent bearing the warning “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Little did we know the anthrax attacks would never be solved. Little did we know Cheney and Rumsfeld were already planning the Iraq invasion.

I don’t think the foie gras turns out too well if you terrify the geese.

Olly olly in free

And while we Democrats are arguing about whether or not to support the healthcare reform bill, and whether or not Obama is living up to his campaign promises, and whether or not his administration is continuing the executive privileges of the Bush/Cheney reign, let’s just remember something.

On this day last year, Bush pardoned 19 people, including a cocaine dealer and an embezzler. He did not pardon Cheney, or Rumsfeld, or John Yoo, or the great Decider.

Eric Holder, please pull those threads!

Alexander Butterfield did us all a great service, 36 years ago today – it was the first time the Senate Watergate committee learned about Nixon’s secret taping system. I wonder if Nixon, when it became public three days later, had an inkling that it might all unravel.

And I’m wondering how another Dick feels today, with all those assassination and Afghanistan and torture and domestic spying threads hanging out.

John Yoo, master of irony

So you’re getting a lot of pressure from your boss, who’s in high CYA mode since he’s already approved torture, to figure out how to make it legal. And (as Condi Rice told that student at Stanford) the White House was really freaked out after 9/11 (especially after they ignored that “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” daily brief). And Dick Cheney is saying, in that scary voice of his, “Torture works.”

But now John Yoo is worried that Sonia Sotomayor might make political, emotional, “results-oriented” decisions.

Dick Cheney and Philip Markoff

There’s a debate going on about how, or when, Cheney turned into Darth Vader. Did all his heart attacks do something bad to his brain? Or did the burden of keeping the country safe after Bush ignored the 9/11 warnings just cause him to lose perspective?

I think he’s always been like that, but it’s also beside the point – it’s like wondering whether the craigslist killer murdered because he needed money for gambling.

They’re both sociopaths. The only difference is that one’s in jail and the other is still pontificating.

And when we’ve gotten to the point as a country where the New York Times can proclaim the key issue is whether or not the torture worked, then it’s we who have lost perspective.

Torture, Part II

“No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.”

Bush/Cheney and their lawyer minions might have done well to reflect on Theodore Roosevelt’s words (from one of his essays in The Strenuous Life).

And, on top of that, the means they used to justify the end don’t even work.

“He pleaded for his life,” according to the former intelligence officer quoted in the New York Times today. “But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give.”

If evil is discrete, if you can add up dead and tortured bodies like numbers in a column, whose evil is greater: Osama bin Laden’s, or Bush/Cheney’s?