"His sadness over Hurricane Katrina is not for the victims in New Orleans, as Mr West understood, but for the damage done to his reputation by that snap of him staring blankly and aloofly down on the catastrophe from the window of Air Force One. His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn't a notion he is doing so."
"It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him."
"Almost every sentence in the Times extraction (and it does feel like having a tooth pulled) invokes a fatigued he-just-doesn't-get-it. Churchill is inevitably adduced, while W bangs on about his passion for reading history. Inevitably, he fails to make the connection. "Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft," urged Winston, and while Bush did little as president other than read history books, the stagecraft entirely eluded him. Some of those tomes must have dealt with the British and Soviet experiences of invading Afghanistan, and not a word sunk in."
This week I've seen Bush interviewed by Oprah and Matt Lauer. Both times he struck me as Alfred E. Neuman with his "What me worry?" smirk. Both interviewers pressed him only a little. When asked about regrets about going to war with Iraq he says the intelligence was wrong about WMD and everyone thought he had them, but the world is still better off without Saddam. Neither interviewer asked about how his administration cherry picked the intelligence, removing the caveats from the internal reports or about the fact that many people at the time thought he didn't have them. Also neither asked about the 4000+ US soldiers killed in that war or the many other wounded or let alone the 100,000+ Iraqis killed. They certainly aren't better off.
Lauer asked what he misses most about being President and Bush answered being Commander in Chief because he loved the troops. But no, there was no followup question about the burden of responsibility of that position during two wars or his failed policies that let those wars become some of the longest in US history.
Update: Oh yeah, there was another point. Lauer did ask him about the deficit and how he's the only president to not raise taxes during a war. Bush said the only fair way to compare presidents is by deficit as a percentage of GDP and that he was better than Reagan or his father and only Clinton in the modern presidents had done better. Lauer didn't follow up saying Reagan had the worst deficit before you. But if I have it right (click on the graph for details), here's a graph of Federal Deficits divided by GDP.
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