There’s still a month and change before W’s public persona only lives on in the toxic legacy that survives his rule, but his farewell tour involves a series of interviews, the kind he’s refused to do for eight years of skirting responsibility. His sister recorded him in an interview which was aired on NPR where he regretted leaving behind Air Force One, the White House chef and never getting stuck in traffic, but generally it seemed to me like the insights of an eighth grader who snuck into the presidency when no one realized he wasn’t supposed to be there. Then there was the interview with Charlie Gibson where W came off like an 11th grader who had no remorse and no long term memory.
Back in April, W remarked, “As long as I’m the president, my measure of success is victory—and success.” Once Frat Boy in Chief leaves office, there will be no one left to lead the battle against the English language, against discourse itself. Instead, President Neo will invite comparisons to Cicero. I still have no idea what he meant when he said “feeance peasance” about contemporary Iraq.
But let’s accept 43’s tautology as an index with which to judge his record. How is the world he leaves behind different from the one he boosted off the shelves of a Wal-Mart in Florida back in 2000? We can’t blame W for everything that’s wrong with life on earth in the early 21st century, the resurgent Red Sox for example, the cancellation of Firefly, the demise of Cosmogirl or the dismal state of popular music. A few things he did directly mess up remain.
The jury is still out on whether Iraq is a debacle or an epic disaster. Hopefully, it will remain the only instance in the history of recorded civilization where the “good guys” launched an unprovoked attack on the “bad guys.” On the war’s plus side, the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis has left a more or less stable Shiite government for the moment. But the current price of oil is too low to sustain sketchy economies in places like Iraq, Alaska, Venezuela, Nigeria or Russia, so expect things to go south in Baghdad by the time Neo takes over. Also, we’re currently below the threshold of profitability for shale oil again, and that makes Canada’s position as the potential savior of SUVs tentative. Ironically, in the run up to the war, Rumsfeld did promise us gas for under $2 a gallon. I doubt he envisioned having to collapse the world’s economy in order to accomplish this, but you never know.
The situation in Afghanistan remains pretty dire. Like it or not, Obomber (his high school basketball nick-name) is stuck with a mess that will continue to destabilize the region for years to come. Rumsfeld gave an interview in which he continued to insist that he sent enough troops to win both wars, except the uncooperative officer corps and crummy soldiers stymied his flawless plans.
W says that liberating 50 million people is his greatest achievement. I don’t think there are that many investment bankers in the world, so I have to assume that he is talking about Afghanis and Iraqis. Let’s give him an incomplete on what will soon be Neo’s wars for the sake of W’s GPA and move on.
The economic meltdown is totally W fault. That’s a given, even though he told Gibson at ABC that the economy actually collapsed 10 years ago, and that isn’t a totally insane thing to say. Robert Rudin recently nuanced an interesting mea culpa on the CDS mess. He says he still believes that risky, imaginary ways of whoring out the same money 15 times is a sane business plan, but he now regrets not sufficiently emphasizing the need to avoid doing it with bad loans as the seed crop. In other words, Rudin has convinced himself that the kids in Risk Assessment take the fall for the current shit storm. They are to blame for not cowboying up, standing up to their CEOs, losing their jobs even, if that’s what it took to head off the stampeding lemmings.
On Long Island, a Wal-Mart greeter was trampled to death by Black Friday shoppers. What I love about this story is that the same shoppers who just killed a guy for getting between them and blue light specials nearly rioted when the managers announced they had to close the store to remove the body. That’s a good illustration of the Conservative read of human nature. Trust me, I’ve recently reread Edmund Burke. I bet Dawkins wasn’t surprised either.
Metaphorically speaking, the SEC regulators, attorneys general and responsible bankers became the guardians of their own doorways to blue light doom thanks to Bush dismantling oversight and the rule of law in the delusional belief that capitalism is governed wisely by the invisible hand of the unbridled market forces. Like Ann Frank, I believe that the basic nature of human beings is good, but W’s term in office has only petitioned the “worser” angels of our nature. I pity that he lacks the introspection to ever realize this.
I guess you blame climate change deniers like W for failing to mitigate greenhouse gases and ocean temperature change, allowing coral reefs to be destroyed, gutting the laws protecting the air and water and imposing Stupid Party litmus tests to impede real science. On the other hand, no president has squared up on climate change, and maybe it is psychologically impossible for folks to accept that human actions have planetary consequences. W gets an F here, but Clinton only got a D.
I expect that in future climate scientists will huddle around campfires and speculate the “what if” of Gore becoming president in 2000. This summer, a bunch of them, including Keith Anderson and my hero James Hanson, met in Exeter, England and basically affirmed by estimation that it’s too late to stop global warming and getting past the time when we can address its consequences in a non-catastrophic way. They talked about the exponential increase of coal use which has devastatingly increased the amount of atmospheric CO2 over the last eight years. They noted the largest increase in methane in a decade due to the accelerating permafrost melt, and mentioned that the ocean can no longer absorb excess CO2 like they could even 20 years ago.
Hurricane season 2008 ended December 1. We didn’t get a blockbuster like Katrina, although Ike did more aggregate damage. Indeed, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike rang up unprecedented levels of damage in the US and Cuba. The total energy output of this hurricane season was double the level of any previously recorded year. It’s possible that in a year or two a category 4 will skip up the Atlantic coast and level Washington or New York. It’s also possible that the next two years will be quiescent, and we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief thinking that the worst is over, that the wind Obama is telling us is at our backs is not blowing at 130 mph.
A chunk of ice the size of Connecticut is about to break off from Antarctica. When it does, it’ll be hard for anyone in the antipodes to deny climate change, but it might take a while for folks up north to register it. This drip-drip-drip of melt will continue until one day the ceiling collapses, Bam!
Once Bush is safely in the Dallas ‘burbs, his stupendously fuzzy brain and inability to nuance detail will ensure that he never loses a minute’s sleep over climate change. As far as he is concerned, the couch was on fire when he passed out on it.
Health care, immigration, worker safety, education, F,F,F,F. So it goes. But what singles out President Retard for special recognition is the post modernist way he brilliantly wove all of his many unrelated misdeeds around a central motif: the utter contempt for the rule of law. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone doing anything short of a full-scale nuclear war that could have done more to transform a semi-functional society into a world teetering on the brink of dissolution.
Consider that W is indirectly responsible for the recent bloodbath in Mumbai. His adventures in nation building created a well-funded, highly-trained and global cadre of zealous fanatics bent on destroying Western civilization. I thank God that the Christian right in this country is too fucking stupid to realize that Mujahideen fanatics want exactly the same thing that they do. If stupid Christians teamed up with stupid Moslems, we’d really be in trouble. Remember when W dared them to “Bring It On!”? He told Gibson that he now regrets declaring the Iraq war on insufficient and unreliable information, which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like his take on the economy. As my Hofstra students used to say, “Do we have to have the test today? I didn’t have a chance to study.”
Then there are the Pirates of the Indian Ocean. They aren’t loveable rogues like Depp. They are of a piece with the lawless, raping scum who have proliferated in the festering cavity of America’s former leadership in international law. Throw a dart at a globe and odds are you’ll hit a place where tribal violence, slavery, sex trafficking, drug running or anarchy are running wild. The central lesson of Iraq is that small, highly organized groups of lunatics are impossible to stop. Thirty guys ground a city nearly twice the size of New York to a complete halt.
Our stalwart international media has decided that one way to deal with this is simply never to mention that the terrorists are Muslims. This is the fruit of W’s war on discourse. Through his tenure, William Ayers, Earth First!ers, Castro, Ahmedinajad, Putin, protestors and random airline passengers were all tarred with the same, vague brush. W forsook any attempt to differentiate between Palestinians who have some legitimate issues and assholes like bin Laden who merely have some Muslim Stupid Party gripes. W was always a big picture guy. The voters in Georgia still believe; take your pick which Georgia I’m referring to.
My former student Katie Scarlet O’Cronin-Furman and a couple of her international law friends have an outstanding blog which details human rights offences. It’s strong stuff written in a witty, engaging way. It’s good to bear witness to these things, and if you’re going to read about war crimes, I highly recommend reading about it on this web site. You can find it here
http://wrongingrights.blogspot.com/

I’d argue that the scum-sucking seadogs off the coast of east Africa are not worse than the scum-sucking vampires of Wall Street, except they don’t dress as well and they have different weapons. But that’s just me. This breakdown of civic order is what Richard Dawkins calls a meme. Let’s leave to one side my belief Dawkins stole this idea from Rupert Sheldrake for another blog. Dawkins’ “variations on a theme” is a version of “monkey see, monkey do.” In this case, the more monkeys who see that you can take on the Man and win, the more other monkeys want to do the same thing, kind of like what’s happening in Athens this week. Although most of us have a lot invested in maintaining the rule of law, we all parse the question of what constitutes fatally undermining the basic trust that holds us together differently. For example, here in the JC, after a light turns red, three more cars speed through. If a pedestrian anticipates, he dies. When I see someone run a light in Manhattan, eight times out of ten they have Jersey plates. It won’t take long before most New Yorkers adopt this meme, too.
Our failure in the Iraq and Afghani wars spawned a much larger turning away from the fear of swift punishment, enabled financial growth for international anarchy through five years of rising oil prices in Africa and central Asia, was topped off with fresh poppy buds fed to disaffected, demoralized Western youth, and wrapped in the big pink ribbon that the worst war crimes were made right here in the good old US of A. While Bush and his no-neck thugs went anywhere they wanted and did whatever they pleased, bin Laden roamed free, suicide bombers cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars and wasted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq alone. Along the way, the fear of reprisal met the reality that there are only so many cops on the beat, and if the cops are overtly lawless, who casts the first stone? This is something my Westies ancestors growing up in Hell’s Kitchen would have intuitively grasped.
In South Louis this week, an alderman urged all the citizens in his district to get guns because the police can’t protect them against the ever-rising murder rate; there aren’t enough to do the job. The economic meltdown is pressing everyone and Guns are flying off the shelves, especially assault rifles (which President Clinton outlawed, you know) because every American thinks he’s Snake Pliskin or the Road Warrior, not random dude #3 who takes a slug in the back.
Ewe can infer that on some level, W has no remorse or misgivings. His late executive filings, his giving away 350 billion dollars with apparently no record or who is getting the money, why they are getting it or what it is being used for, his embedding diehard neocons in the Federal bureaucracy, suggest that he still believe he steered the ship of state on the right course, even though most of the rest of us think these sure look like rocks.