Wiping The Sleep From Their Tired Little Eyes

by digby

I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who found this article by John Dickerson to be completely ridiculous. A former white house correspondent from TIME magazine apparently has no idea how stupid he sounds when he says he held the belief that Bush was some sort of behind the scenes mastermind until he saw the footage of the Katrina video conference. Weldon says:

So. Okay. What we have here is an experienced Washington hand who has presumably been conscious during at least some of the past five years, and is only now — and only because he saw the frickin’ video — beginning to worry that Bush may not be quite as competent as those responsible for covering his ass say he is. Didn’t it ever occur to Dickerson that executives who consistently ask good questions eventually get good answers that lead to at least an occasional good outcome? Have there been any good outcomes?

No.

I can understand why people may have intially thought that the guy just had to be smarter than he appeared in public because well.. nobody that dumb could possibly be president. It just defied reason. It wasn’t long, however, before it became clear that the Republican Party had insulted our collective intelligence beyond our wildest imaginings by using sophisticated marketing techniques and every lever of institutional power at their disposal to install an idiot manchild in the oval office. (I came to believe they did it just to prove they could.)

After it was revealed that he had ignored the terrorism threat until 9/11 and then he continued to screw up everything that came after, any sentient being should have been able to see that what you saw in public was real: an arrogant, spoiled inarticulate man who didn’t have a clue about how to run the most powerful country in the world. Regardless of how many “grown-ups” he had around him, he was the head of the organization and the organization was a reflection of him. They always are. His staff was just as inept as he was.

Bush’s entire life had consisted of trading on his father’s name and failing at everything he touched. That is the legacy of this failed presidency as well. That John Dickerson is only now beginning to realize that Bush is exactly what he appears to be is nothing short of mind boggling.

Eric Boehlert, one of the few journalists around who was as gobsmacked by the gooey Bush adulation among the press corps as the rest of us were wrote back in February of 2002, after Bob Woodward’s fellatory series called “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet”:

Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable: “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet” erased any suggestion of Bush as a detached as well as inexperienced leader who relies on more seasoned aides to get things done.

To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. We see Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading round-table discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches and seeking last-minute phrase changes.

The portrait was so contrary to public perception that it was reminiscent of the timeless “Saturday Night Live” sketch that ran at the height of Iran-Contra scandal. It featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the operation’s arcane covert details, barking out orders to befuddled senior aides. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted as a genial delegator, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, is in fact a hands-on commander in chief of the war on terror.

It was ridiculous, laughable, absurd and yet they actually succeeded in convincing am large number of Americans that they weren’t seeing what they thought they were seeing:

You know, I’m asked all the time — I’ll ask myself a question. (Laughter.) How do I respond to — it’s an old trick — (laughter) — how do I respond when I see that in some Islamic countries there is vitriolic hatred for America? I’ll tell you how I respond: I’m amazed. I’m amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am — like most Americans, I just can’t believe it. Because I know how good we are, and we’ve go to do a better job of making our case. We’ve got to do a better job of explaining to the people in the Middle East, for example, that we don’t fight a war against Islam or Muslims. We don’t hold any religion accountable. We’re fighting evil. And these murderers have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their evil deeds. And we cannot let it stand

Jesus H. Christ.

Now, like John Dickerson,Howard Fineman, (one of the gushiest Bush hagiographers) seems to have just discovered that the emperor has no clothes as well:

The man-of-few-words approach has its virtues, and they matched the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and, for the most part, since. Bush’s deep belief in his vision of global democratization, coupled with the eloquence of speeches crafted for state occasions by Michael Gerson, carried the day. Dazed and confused and searching for old verities after the terrorist attacks, I think most Americans found some comfort in Bush the Growling Cowboy.

I know it’s a shock to Republicans but the president’s primary job is not to provide comfort in an emergency, it’s to deal effectively with the emergency. In that, he has always failed. There was, apparently, a massive need among the media (and perhaps the public) to believe that the puerile drivel that Bush spouted after 9/11 was an effective way to deal with Islamic terrorism. In fact, it was precisely the opposite.

Feinman has an epiphany:

That time has passed, though. The main reason of course, is that the simple, black-and-white solutions that the president sketched for us in the “war on terror” haven’t materialized. Most Americans now consider the war in Iraq to have been a mistake, one that has made us less secure here in what is now called “the homeland.” They see his Manichaean clarity not as a comfort, but as a danger — because it underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.

No kidding. But then it was always bullshit and a good many of us knew it at the time. The “Manichean clarity” was fairy dust that any high school kid should have seen through. Yet Fineman was desperately in love with Cowboy Bush, as were so many of the elite press corps (for reasons that only their psychologists or spouses can understand) that he wrote:

So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ’80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform — whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ’60s — but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

And now he has the nerve to say that wearing costumes and talking like a cartoon character “underestimates the complexity of the real world. There are many more moving parts to consider in the world than the simple clockwork Bush had described.” No shit.

I blame the press as much as I blame the Republicans for this nonsense. If they hadn’t gotten a schoolkid crush on Bush after 9/11 and had maintained even a modicum of professionalism, we might not have had to endure this horrible failure for a second term. They built him up so high, and kept him there so long, that it was impossible for the public to fully comprehend what a miserable failure he was until it was too late. Now we are stuck with this bozo for another three years because these alleged journalists took five years to realize what was evident to anyone with eyes to see: George W. Bush was unqualified by brains, temperament or experience to be president, and the party he represents treated their country with tremendous disrespect by anointing such a man for such an important job. They have failed as much as he has and they have a lot to answer for.

Update:

There were some earlier reports about Bush’s behavior in meetings, but nobody wanted to deal with the reality that we had a child in the oval office.

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