Well, I Guess if you need a Real Man...

[Rewrite of an earlier post, in which I blamed it on the Washington Examiner; apologies for my error but perhaps they don't mind. Anyway--]

Here's The Washington Times on the execution: "Obama fulfills Bush goal." Couple it with an editorial headed "No Class: Obama snubs Bush, praises himself."

I should have thought Obama showed remarkable compassion in forbearing to call attention to one of the most colossal intelligence cockups in modern history. And for not reminding the voters of this

Mrs. Buce Notes a Remarkable Instance Of Generosity on the Part Of Our Former President

Scott McClellan, George W. Bush's former press secretary, has long since burned his bridges with his old boss, and now the former president returns the favor.  In Bush's  memoir, Decision Points, McClellan does not appear:

...Mr. Bush said Mr. McClellan was irrelevant.

“He was not a part of a major decision. This is a book about decisions. This isn’t a book about, you know, personalities or gossip or settling scores. I didn’t think he was relevant.”

Well, that's a kindness, says Mrs.Buce.  He's saying that none of it was Scott's fault. 

Bush's Third Term?

Weekend meme: Obama #1 is Bush #3.

It's a tempting thought as we watch our President morph into the Rodney King of American politics--savagely beaten around the head and shoulders, only to emerge with a plaintive "can't we all get along?" People said he'd come to hate it soon enough: the Presidency as long-term confinement.

There's certainly a degree to which he's brought it all on himself. He never quite warned us (though we might have noticed, if we'd had our eyes open) that he was a compulsive centrist at heart--we weren't really prepared for the shock. He might not have suspected himself how comfortable he would be with the experience of power once it was his hand on the lever. And he really does not seem to have mastered the knack of articulating his vision--meaning that he'll be burned in effigy at the tea-party convention, the same time he is being skinned alive by Glenn Greenwald.

In his (partial?) defense, you'd have to say also that what we are observing here also is a phenom of modern first-world politics: every modern leader takes office the prisoner of a larger agenda, and the agenda is eye-poppingly narrow. As the original proposer points out, it's not just Obama--Bill Clinton remained captive of Ronald Reagan, and Tony Blair, of Margaret Thatcher. People who do try to rewrite the script--Bush #2, Reagan--do succeed in breaking some crockery, but at the end of the day, they probably change a lot less than they wished.

So Obama's natural instincts play naturally into a larger framework which might serve to define him even if he wasn't so willing to be defined. The really successful ones (I suppose Reagan is the example again) are the ones who convince us they are bringing "change" when they're leaving no sacred cow unbloated. Still, at least once in a while you'd think he might reach for the crockery. I mean, is that too much to ask?

Spoof?

No spoof?

You decide.

Where Is He Now?

Just quoting Letterman is brain-dead blogging but I thought this bit (on "whatever happened to George Bush?") is a keeper:

Within months of leaving the White House in January 2009, George and his wife Laura divorced. George moved to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon where he got work as assistant manager of a paving company. By the end of the year, he married the company receptionist, Bethany, and they have two children, Ethan and Charlotte. George is now co-owner of the paving company, and in his spare time he enjoys watching NASCAR and participating in chili cook-offs. He says he liked being President, but he wouldn't trade his new life for anything.

The visuals helped.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Hilzoy and Atrios are mulling over the paucity of pardons in the twilight of the Bush years, and in particular of his failure to pardon people from that great smorgasbord of malefactors who have served under him.

Without particularly disputing anything they say, I'd offer another insight: Bush has shown himself pretty much indifferent to the fortunes of other people period. Set aside the question of Bush team wrongdoing: there are any number of poor schmucks out there who did something ubambiguously wrong back there one day, but who got between the upper and nether millstone of a judicial system that was really more strenuous than needful. Seems to me that the system expects, indeed requires perhaps just a bit of executive discretion in precisely cases of this sort. Wouldn't have piggied my wiggy at all if Bush had done a bit more of that before he left. I suppose the upside is we've got one more reason to remember why we didn't think much of him anyway.

Clarification: And no, this time I am not talking about Michael Milken.

Bush the Reader: Doing the Numbers

I see that Karl Rove is back on the Bush-is-a-great reader meme (WSJ, "Bush is a Book Lover, p A11; cf. link). Not wanting to question the veracity of so distinguished a public servant, I must then accept at face value that the number of books the President finished in 2005 was 95. Do the numbers: assume, conservatively, that each book has 250 pages, then that is a total of 23,750 pages for the year. At 30 pages an hour, that would be 791.67 hours spent reading, or the equivalent of just under 20 work weeks. With a pace like that, I wonder how he ever found time to go to church?

Rove also says that he outdid the President in reading, and that the President's excuse was that "he'd been busy as Leader of the Free World." I assume that's a joke.

Defenders of Freedom on the Defense of Freedom

Here's the latest "Bushism," from Jacob Weisberg:

I've abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.

I really don't know quite how to take this. I gather the "Bushisms" are primarily intended to reveal out leader's Inner Oaf--to suggest the sloppy and incoherent interior that lies behind the sloppy and incoherent exterior. But if that is the purpose here, then I think Weisberg has flamed out. It seems to me that as a general proposition, Bush here is entirely right. Or rather, Bush's insight is the kind of thing I've been hearing ever since I first learned any politics (at the feet of Heinz Eulau at Antioch College in the 50s)--often, for what it is worth, about Franklin (destroy capitalism in order to save it) Roosevelt. It's called the irony of history. Hegel (another guy who wasn't always such a standout in the felicitous speech department) would chuckle. Of course it may be that Weisberg expects to understand that Bush is simply no ironist. That may be true, and sufficient, but it's still a modest point, not very well made.

The greater scandal (and this may be what Weisberg had in mind in the first place) is the suggestion that Bush ever had anything to do with free market principles in the first place--unless, that is, the set "anything to do" includes the subset "rape and pillage." Look, for the umpteenth time: denuding the public fisc for your pals is not free market, it is cronyism. The Bush clan has bathed itself so long in the warm chowder of cronyism that we can hardly expect them to catch the point. But the rest of us need not to be fooled. This. Is. Not. A. Free. Market. Regime. And if this is what Weisberg is reminding us of, then bully for him.

In the same vein, I see that The Wall Street Journal is once again reminding us that necessary components of free market capitalism are torture and repression. It's an arguable proposition (many Marxists would agree with it), but one I take to be grotesquely wrong. For the moment, though, if anybody ever again tries to utter the phrase "Wall Street Journal" and the word "libertarian" in the same simple declarative sentence, I think I will oof my cookies.

McCain, Bush and the Character Thing

I whined last night about John McCain being ignorant and incurious. A little voice in my head tells me I’ve got it wrong here. Not wrong on facts but wrong on significance: knowledge/intelligence (the voice says) are not good benchmarks measuring success among presidents. .

Consider the man who may be the smartest—and also the best informed and hardest working—president of our time: Richard Nixon. In some ways, Nixon was actually a pretty good president, but in so many others, he was awful. Fred Greenstein says somewhere that he is a great instance of why it is so pointless to try to rate our presidents. For our purposes, the point is that bis intelligence helped him to be who he was. It was his character that poisoned him; that vengeful paranoia that made him so vulnerable to the forces that brought him down.

Bill Clinton is perhaps another whose indisputable grasp of issues was hampered by his equally indisputable defects of character. And here I think there is a good deal of misunderstanding: the chattering classes tend to like him because of intelligence, whereas I think for most voters, his intelligence as a side issue, if not an impediment. If they liked him at all (and many did) it was because of the way he related to themm, and they identified with him—because, in short, he was trailer trash.

The other end of the spectrum is Gerald Ford—perhaps the only president in my lifetime with whom you would not dread to be caught in an elevator. It’s conventional to say that he wasn’t clever. He certainly wasn’t brilliant like Nixon or Clinton. The record is clear, however, that he was curious; that he was open to evidence, and that he did the best he knew how to weigh facts in the balance, and to act on the best advice he could get. Eisenhower and Bush fit someplace close to the same model. None of them was a perfect president—how many are?—but as occupants of the office, they are pretty good exemplars of what we want a president to be.

The great exception to all of this is Reagan, whose incuriosity seems almost in a class of its own. But the case of Reagan is always more tricky than it appears at first blush. Lou Cannon liked to say: people think Reagan isn’t smart—well he isn’t smart, but he isn’t dumb, either. The fact is that Reagan was unmatched at articulating and communicating a vision--and getting lucky didn’t hurt him a bit. He was so good at that one job (and so lucky) that he didn’t need to let the facts get in his way.

Seen in this light, what is wrong with W is not so much that he is ignorant or incurious—which he is—so much as that he is mean, petty, bullying and vengeful. His incuriosity is not just an incident: it’s a weapon that he likes to use to club his enemies.

I’ll stick to my guns, then, that McCain is ignorant and incurious. But his success or a failure as a president will (would?) turn less on his raw abilities than on his character. I’ll also stick to my guns that he isn’t as nasty and mean-spirited as the incumbent. The question is whether his own traits of character are enough to supervene over the other, perhaps more obvious, shortcomings in his resume.

Did I Mention that the Publication Date Was October 25, 2003?

From Amazon:

The Bush Boom
by Jerry Bowyer*
Forward by Lawrence Kudlow

Copies Available for a penny (link).

H/T: Big Picture.

* Apparently this guy.

Maybe He Has Cooties

Interesting to watch Arlen Specter on Bill Maher talking about how he—Specter—came through his bout with cancer—and in particular talking about that picture of him shaking hands with President Bush. But it’s pretty clear that Bush thought him creepy, maybe contagious, and that he couldn’t get away fast enough. When you are as old and dug in as Specter is—and when you come from a state where the Dems are doing pretty well—I guess you can let your annoyance show.

Specter on Bush

Interesting to watch Arlen Specter on Bill Maher talking about how he—Specter—came through his bout with cancer—and in particular talking about that picture of him shaking hands with President Bush. But it’s pretty clear that Bush thought him creepy, maybe contagious, and that he couldn’t get away fast enough. When you are as old and dug in as Specter is—and when you come from a state where the Dems are doing pretty well—I guess you can let your annoyance show.

Presidents with Good Intentions

Who said this? No, it is not George W. Bush. But consider:

I meant well … . My conscience was clear as a crystal glass, without a scruple or doubt. I was borne along by an irresistible sense of duty. God prospered our labors; and, awful, dreadful, and deplorable as the consequences have been, I cannot but hope that the ultimate good of the world, of the human race, and of our beloved country, is intended and will be accomplished by it.

After digesting that little wonder, consider the passage that precedes sit:

Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since?

—John Adams to Benjamin Rush, August 28, 1811,
quoted in The American Enlightenment 211
(Koch. Ed., George Braziller Inc. 1965)

Have always wondered whether JA was pulling our leg. Wonder what he would have thought of the Russian Revolution.

Too Wonderful for Words

I can't begin to embellish on the truth here (link). Go ahead, click through, you'll thank me. HT: Kottke, who is on a roll today.

On Privatizing West Point, etc.

I have been wondering—do libertarians favor the privatization of West Point? It sounded like a silly idea to me when I first thought of it, but if all we are doing is training people for their real careers at Blackwater, It seems to me that it is worth considering.

One difficulty is that it would limit education to the rich, and we know the rich aren’t really interested in getting shot at. But I think I may have thought up a way around that. The thing is, the military may have become too workmanlike and bureaucratic—too much like, say, accounting.

The point that libertarians may miss here is that men aren’t really motivated all that much by wealth per se. They’re much more concerned with status. They’ll take a job like, say, drug runner, even though it pays less than MacDonald’s because it is so much more cool than McDonald’s. This trait seems to be hard-wired. Anthropologists say that in primitive societies, men would go hunting even though it yielded less food than hoeing the beans, because hoeing the beans was the iron age version of McDonalds. No matter that it cost you more energy than it yielded; think how nifty it would be to tell the chicks you took down a wooly mammoth.

And think of status relationships in ancient societies. In Greece, you wanted to be a hipparch; in Rome, an equestrian. In each case, note the root “horse.” In each case, you were a special kind of guy guy if you could had enough money to fit out your own battle horse. People clawed each other's face off for the opportunity. A status game.

It might be starting already. My friend Scott tells me he knows a guy who claims title to the world’s largest privately-owned collection of surplus Army tanks. Just today, I saw that Hummer is already advertising that you ought to buy one of their urban attack vehicles so you can help rescue people next time there is a hurricane. With your own time. And risk and money. A status thing again. Like I say, wiring.

Ought to be even easier with airplanes. What if the young George Bush, instead of being forced into a plane owned by the state of Texas (or Alabama) had had to show up with his own equipment--with, I assume, his own name festooned on the side (and, I suppose, his own crew, chosen from out of his posse) You wouldn’t have been able to pry him out of the cockpit. And just think how different our history might have been. No, on second thought, don’t. Bad idea. Sorry.

Bush Tracks Underbelly

President Bush at the Union League Club of Chicago today (Jan 8, 2008) (link):

For example, the housing market. What's interesting about the housing market is that, you know, in the old days you'd sit down with your lender and work out a deal; and then if you came on a hard time and you're still credit-worthy, then he would help you refinance the loan. Well, those mortgages that have been made in recent times have been bundled up into financial instruments and sold. So it's hard to get the borrower and the lender face-to-face to help the borrower stay in the home. That's the challenge.

See Underbelly last April 3 (link), April 10 (link), April 22 (link).

Separated at Birth?

Coincidence?
I think not...

Bremer to Bush: Oh, No You Don't

In the pile-on rush to parse Paul Bremer’s response to W’s shaky memory (link), may I highlight a meta-issue? I.e., this is the best evidence yet that this administration is over, ended, finito, kaputt, that nobody is afraid of this guy any more.

Return with me for a moment to the halcyon days 2002. Can’t we all remember the almost Soviet-like efficiency with which the administration slapped down on any whisper of discord from anyone Republican within 20 miles of the Oval Office? Of course those days ended a long time ago, but I still think it is a marvel to see the President tell his story in the Sunday paper and then whap, two news cycles away we see one of the most important players on his most important team effectively calling him a liar. And dishing out the goods to prove it.

Watch Bremer as he refuses to be the fall guy:

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had steadily distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding thwt he had sent as draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense. …

On Monday, Mr. Bremer made it clear that he was unhappy about being portrayed as a renegade of sorts by a variety of former administration officials.

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

Put a fork in it, this one is done: oh wait, the Ambassador just did.

Afterthought: Nothing herein should be taken as foreclosing the possibility that we will bomb Iran.

My Two Cents on Impeachment

Lots of attention this weekend to the polling data on impeachment (link). I'm still not for it; conceded that this presidency is a train wreck, I still think there are better things for Congress to do with its time. But I am impressed that 86 percent of Republicans still oppose impeachment (with one percent undecided). That means that 13 percent of his own party -- the most loyal rump of the rump--have cut and run.

Oh, and as to "Impeach Cheney"--note that the cognoscenti were here months ago (link).

Followup: Rasmussen, via TPM, says 16 percent (sted 13) (link). TPM also points out that more people favor impeaching Bush now than favored impeaching Clinton while he was being impeached.

Ross on Slow Boring of Hard Boards

Deep into his absorbing (if sprawling and uneven) book Statecraft, Dennis Ross comes up with one good anecdote that might find its place in a novel. The time is 1990. The situation is the run-up to the first Gulf War, where Ross is at work (under the leadership of Secretary of State James A. Baker) to get the (collapsing) Soviet Union on board for an invasion of Iraq. Ross has established a back-channel relationship with Sergei Tarasenko, the confidante of Edward Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign secretary under Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. “[I]n the fall,” Ross recounts

The political counterattacks and pressures within the Kremlin against Shevardnadze led Gorbachev to allow Yevgeny Primakov, a longtime Soviet Arabist with a close relationship to Saddam to come to Washington to try to persuade us to alter our approach away from pressure on Saddam to an engagement strategy in which Saddam might be given something in order to get him to withdraw. … At this juncture, Tarasenko sent me an extraordinary message through a secure channel, showing both desperation and the extent of his trust in [our] relationship:

Dennis,

Primakov is coming over Shevardnadze’s opposition. He is against Saddam paying a price. He wants to reward him. His mission has been pushed on Gorbachev and if he succeeds, he will replace Shevardnadze as foreign minister and end everything we have been working for. He must be seen as failing and creating problems with the United States. This is a desperate situation.

Sergei’

Dennis Ross, Statecraft 85 (2007)

“Needless to say,” Ross adds, “the president made sure that Primakov was seen as failing.” It’s a dramatic but still useful capsule summary of Ross’s message. “Statecraft” here is a not entirely felicitous shorthand for what Ross has spent his career at, what he thinks the W has failed so miserably to follow through on, and what he hopes will occupy center stage on the agenda of the next administration. More precisely: the slow boring of hard boards, patient listening and talking, the hard work of engagement with our friends and our enemies.

The book is complicated by a triple agenda; it is at once a critique, a program, and an apologia pro vita sua—skeptical readers will say it is Ross’ brief for why he should be Secretary of State. Maybe it is, and maybe he should be, but he still makes a compelling critique and a set of persuasive recommendations. If his program isn’t quite as comprehensive as he supposes (government is not only negotiations, after all), still there is good reason to believe that the W regime has fallen down on the job, and blown off a lot of good opportunities.

The hero of this account, if it is not Ross himself, is Baker, the Richelieu, the Metternich, the all-round Mr. Fix-it of the Reagan and Bush I years. Ross’ showcase item is his account of the orchestration around the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in particular, the repositioning of Germany inside NATO—one of those political coups pulled off so smoothly that you almost forget that it happened and (more disturbingly) how easily it might have gone otherwise. Ross makes a powerful case that things like this don’t just happen; that it was Baker, with a lot of skill and virtually unflagging effort, who put it all together. [There is another, not radically different, account of the same episode by another participant –Robert Zoelleck, newly installed as president of the World Bank (link)]

Next in importance behind Baker we have Richard Holbrooke, then assistant secretary of state who (as Ross undertakes to show) brought off an extraordinary smoke-and-mirrors trick in achieving a kind of stability and order in the former Yugoslavia. It’s easy to forget already that there are really two stages to the Yugoslav story in the 90s—before Holbrooke, under both Bush and Clinton, when things were really a mess, and after, when Holbrooke, with a combination of skill and good timing, succeeded in making a dreadful situation at least somewhat better. Indeed, if Ross does hope to be secretary of state, he may have to get in line; Holbrooke is only 66, and still pretty spry (Ross is 58).

This kind of background sets Ross up for what must be seen as the heart of the book; his “12 rules to follow” in negotiation, and his “11 rules” for mediation. At first glance, these may be the same-old same-old that you would get from any attempt to explain bargaining techniques, from Thomas Schelling and Roger Fisher down to the whole raft of MBA revivalist tracts. The “rules” earn their keep here as filters for Ross’ own formidable experience, particularly working with Palestinians and Israelis.

All of which sets himself up for his unsparing critique of the W administration:

The Bush administration has certainly not had a negotiating mind-set for dealing with friends or adversaries. … Too often the Bush administration has lectured others and has not tried to persuade them. Too often it has conveyed that it knows best and that others need to accept this. Too often it has thought that the essence of diplomacy is to give a speech and expect others to respond. … The patience is rarely there for painstaking work. The mechanisms for follow-up are almost always lacking. The level of effort from the top is either short-lived or missing in action. The instinct to ask hard questions, certainly by the president, is almost unmistakably absent.

Id., 336-7

Nothing to add, your honor.

Fn.: Well, yes, something to add. The Middle East peace story is a morass all its own. Ross previously weighed in with his own account. For a dissenting view, go here.