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  • A President Forgotten but Not Gone
    By FRANK RICH

    WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

    The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

    The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press. Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure. On Thanksgiving weekend 2003, even as the Iraqi insurgency was spiraling, his secret trip to the war zone was a P.R. slam-dunk. The photo of the beaming commander in chief bearing a supersized decorative turkey for the troops was designed to make every front page and newscast in the country, and it did. Five years later, in what was intended as a farewell victory lap to show off Iraq’s improved post-surge security, Bush was reduced to ducking shoes.

    He tried to spin the ruckus as another victory for his administration’s program of democracy promotion. “That’s what people do in a free society,” he said. He had made the same claim three years ago after the Palestinian elections, championed by his “freedom agenda” (and almost $500 million of American aid), led to a landslide victory for Hamas. “There is something healthy about a system that does that,” Bush observed at the time, as he congratulated Palestinian voters for rejecting “the old guard.”

    The ruins of his administration’s top policy priority can be found not only in Gaza but in the new “democratic” Iraq, where the local journalist who tossed the shoes was jailed without formal charges and may have been tortured. Almost simultaneously, opponents of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki accused him of making politically motivated arrests of rival-party government officials in anticipation of this month’s much-postponed provincial elections.

    Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.

    The joke was on us. Iraq burned, New Orleans flooded, and Bush remained oblivious to each and every pratfall on his watch. Americans essentially stopped listening to him after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, but he still doesn’t grasp the finality of their defection. Lately he’s promised not to steal the spotlight from Barack Obama once he’s in retirement — as if he could do so by any act short of running naked through downtown Dallas. The latest CNN poll finds that only one-third of his fellow citizens want him to play a post-presidency role in public life.

    Bush is equally blind to the collapse of his propaganda machinery. Almost poignantly, he keeps trying to hawk his goods in these final days, like a salesman who hasn’t been told by the home office that his product has been discontinued. Though no one is listening, he has given more exit interviews than either Clinton or Reagan did. Along with old cronies like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, he has also embarked on a Bush “legacy project,” as Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard described it on CNN.

    To this end, Rove has repeated a stunt he first fed to the press two years ago: he is once again claiming that he and Bush have an annual book-reading contest, with Bush chalking up as many as 95 books a year, by authors as hifalutin as Camus. This hagiographic portrait of Bush the Egghead might be easier to buy were the former national security official Richard Clarke not quoted in the new Vanity Fair saying that both Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had instructed him early on to keep his memos short because the president is “not a big reader.”

    Another, far more elaborate example of legacy spin can be downloaded from the White House Web site: a booklet recounting “highlights” of the administration’s “accomplishments and results.” With big type, much white space, children’s-book-like trivia boxes titled “Did You Know?” and lots of color photos of the Bushes posing with blacks and troops, its 52 pages require a reading level closer to “My Pet Goat” than “The Stranger.”

    This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

    If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.

    But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.

    The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

    He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”

    “The attacks of September the 11th came out of nowhere,” he said in another interview, as if he hadn’t ignored frantic intelligence warnings that summer of a Qaeda attack. But it was an “intelligence failure,” not his relentless invocation of patently fictitious “mushroom clouds,” that sped us into Iraq. Did he take too long to change course in Iraq? “What seems like an eternity today,” he says, “may seem like a moment tomorrow.” Try telling that to the families of the thousands killed and maimed during that multiyear “moment” as Bush stubbornly stayed his disastrous course.

    The crowning personality tic revealed by Bush’s final propaganda push is his bottomless capacity for self-pity. “I was a wartime president, and war is very exhausting,” he told C-Span. “The president ends up carrying a lot of people’s grief in his soul,” he told Gibson. And so when he visits military hospitals, “it’s always been a healing experience,” he told The Wall Street Journal. But, incredibly enough, it’s his own healing he is concerned about, not that of the grievously wounded men and women he sent to war on false pretenses. It’s “the comforter in chief” who “gets comforted,” he explained, by “the character of the American people.” The American people are surely relieved to hear it.

    With this level of self-regard, it’s no wonder that Bush could remain undeterred as he drove the country off a cliff. The smugness is reinforced not just by his history as the entitled scion of one of America’s aristocratic dynasties but also by his conviction that his every action is blessed from on high. Asked last month by an interviewer what he has learned from his time in office, he replied: “I’ve learned that God is good. All the time.”

    Once again he is shifting the blame. This presidency was not about Him. Bush failed because in the end it was all about him.

  • Krugman Calls GOP "Party of Whiners"
    As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

    Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

    But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.

    The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

    If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

    Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

    Read the rest here.

  • A toast to the GOP for a heck of a year with a stellar closing act
    One last look at the imbecilic Republican Party of 2008.--Ed.


    excerpt:

    We'd like to propose a toast.

    Here's to the Republican Party for a year no one will soon forget. When 2008 began, you were still hopeful. A long trend of Republican gay sex scandals had finally come to an end and you were thinking that maybe you could sneak out of the shadow of the worst president in memory and really shine. That didn't quite work out.

    You launched into a presidential primary crawling with Mormons, cross-dressers, gay-hating bass players, and one enraged septuagenarian. You ran the one least likely to be alive in November, and you paired him up with a beauty queen whose political talent amounted to knowing five different ways of saying, "I know you are but what am I?"

    You spent much of the autumn being blamed for the worst economy since the depression, then you even managed to get blamed for not doing what was necessary to fix it.

    You lost one veteran Senator to an indictment. Liddy Dole made sure that the Bush dynasty wouldn't be the only GOP family dynasty to come to an inglorious end this year. You became known as the party of hate-mongering, your "base" was characterized by people demanding that their opponent be murdered. In the end, you lost all three branches of government and your only victory was limiting the sweeping Democratic victory to a few Senators short of a filibuster proof majority. Congrats.

    Read the rest here.

  • There Has To Be An Invisible Sun






    I don't want to spend the rest of my life
    Looking at the barrel of an armalite
    I don't want to spend the rest of my days
    Keeping out of trouble like the soldiers say
    I don't want to spend my time in hell
    Looking at the walls of a prison cell
    I don't ever want to play the part
    Of a statistic on a government chart

    There has to be an invisible sun
    It gives its heat to everyone
    There has to be an invisible sun
    That gives us hope when the whole days done

    Its dark all day, and it glows all night
    Factory smoke and acetylene light
    I face the day with me head caved in
    Looking like something that the cat brought in

    There has to be an invisible sun
    It gives its heat to everyone
    There has to be an invisible sun
    That gives us hope when the whole days done

    And they're only going to change this place by
    Killing everybody in the human race
    And they would kill me for a cigarette
    But I don't even wanna die just yet

    There has to be an invisible sun
    It gives its heat to everyone
    There has to be an invisible sun
    It gives us hope when the whole day's done

    lyrics by Sting

  • 2008 Year in Review


    Happy New Year, dear readers. May 2009 be free of rightwing jerks, bad bosses, Sarah Palin, stupid civil servants and an economy in freefall.--Editor

  • Katrina "Last Nail" for Bush
    Excerpt:

    Hurricane Katrina not only pulverized the Gulf Coast in 2005, it knocked the bully pulpit out from under President George W. Bush, according to two former advisers who spoke candidly about the political impact of the government's poor handling of the natural disaster.

    "Katrina to me was the tipping point," said Matthew Dowd, Bush's pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign. "The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn't matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn't matter. P.R.? It didn't matter. Travel? It didn't matter."

    Dan Bartlett, former White House communications director and later counselor to the president, said: "Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin."

    Their comments are a part of an oral history of the Bush White House that Vanity Fair magazine compiled for its February issue, which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday, and nationally on Jan. 6. Vanity Fair published comments by current and former government officials, foreign ministers, campaign strategists and numerous others on topics that included Iraq, the anthrax attacks, the economy and immigration.

    Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said that as a new president, Bush was like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee whom critics said lacked knowledge about foreign affairs. When Bush first came into office, he was surrounded by experienced advisers like Vice President Dick Cheney and Powell, who Wilkerson said ended up playing damage control for the president.

    "It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like president _ because, let's face it, that's what he was _ was going to be protected by this national-security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire," Wilkerson said, adding that he considered Cheney probably the "most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur" he'd ever met.

    "He became vice president well before George Bush picked him," Wilkerson said of Cheney. "And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush _ personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum."

    On other topics, David Kuo, who served as deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, disputed the idea that the Bush White House was dominated by religious conservatives and catered to the needs of a religious right voting bloc.

    "The reality in the White House is _ if you look at the most senior staff _ you're seeing people who aren't personally religious and have no particular affection for people who are religious-right leaders," Kuo said.

    "In the political affairs shop in particular, you saw a lot of people who just rolled their eyes at ... basically every religious-right leader that was out there, because they just found them annoying and insufferable. These guys were pains in the butt who had to be accommodated."

  • FORMER USAO PRESIDENT ROY TROUTT DIES AT 87
    I will always remember Dr. Troutt's kindness and generosity of spirit.--Editor

    CHICKASHA – The longest tenured president in the college’s history, Roy Troutt, will be remembered as the fiercely independent leader who provided a quarter century of stability at the helm of the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. Troutt died late Friday at Norman Regional Hospital after a brief illness. He was 87.

    Services are scheduled Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the USAO Alumni Chapel. Officiating will be the Rev. Bob Rice, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Norman. Interment is scheduled at Fairlawn Cemetery in Chickasha.

    “USAO has lost a great leader and Oklahoma has lost a proud public servant,” said USAO President John Feaver on Saturday. “Roy Troutt was a mentor and friend. I worked 20 years for him in various roles and learned immeasurably from his strong and compassionate leadership. He has left an indelible mark on the institution’s legacy, having served exactly one quarter of its hundred years of service to the state of Oklahoma. It would be impossible to tell the university’s story without telling Roy’s. Its modern success is a tribute to his service and devotion. The college family was his family.” Flags have been lowered to half staff on campus in Troutt’s memory.

    Roy Troutt was born on Jan. 27, 1921, in Durant, Okla., and died on Friday, Dec. 26, 2008, in Norman.

    A native Oklahoman, he attended Durant Public Schools, received his bachelor's degree at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and master's and doctor's degrees from the University of Oklahoma.

    Retiring from USAO in 2000, Roy Troutt’s 60-year career in Oklahoma education spanned seven decades, 11 U.S. presidents and 13 Oklahoma governors. His presidential colleagues from other institutions dubbed him the "dean of college presidents."

    Under his leadership, USAO refined it signature liberal arts curriculum, regained unconditional accreditation and earned its first national ranking for academic quality in U.S. News and World Report. He led the school through the lean 1970s after changing to coeducational status, through the oil bust of the 1980s and to revitalization in the 1990s, when Sparks Hall was redesigned and the Student Center got an elaborate makeover. In his honor, the USAO Board of Regents christened the school's Administration Building "Troutt Hall" in the fall of 1995.

    When the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame was created in 1994, Troutt was named among the first inductees that inaugural year. Earlier that year, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, from which he earned his bachelor's degree in 1941. In 2000, the Ardmore Public School Foundation named Troutt among the first inductees to its new hall of fame.

    Before coming to Chickasha, Troutt was dean of the College of Liberal Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Before that, he was chairman of the Department of Education and Psychology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, and a teacher, coach, and administrator in the Ardmore City Schools.

    Throughout his career, Troutt has also served in many civic organizations. He was past president of the Ardmore United Fund, Inc., and the Ardmore YMCA. He was a member of the board of directors of the Chickasha Chamber of Commerce and the Salvation Army. He served for many years as chairman of the board of the Jane Brooks School for the Deaf in Chickasha. Troutt is a past district governor of Rotary District 5770 and past international director of Rotary International. For his support of international humanitarian and education programs, Troutt received the Citation for Meritorious Service and the Distinguished Service Award of the Rotary Foundation. Locally, the Chickasha Rotary Club honored Troutt with a Meritorious Service Award for 20 years of service to the club. He traveled six continents as an ambassador for Rotary, attending its international activities and speaking at its events.

    A decorated veteran of World War II, Troutt established an expertise in the handling and disposing of explosives. During a tour of duty in the Pacific, Troutt employed his training during the famed Leyte Invasion in the Philippines and during invasions of other Pacific islands. Then, in Washington D.C., he headed the research division of the Navy Bomb Disposal School until the War ended in 1945. For his service in the Navy, Troutt earned the Bronze Star and other citations.

    His higher education leadership in Oklahoma became a resource to other colleges across America because he served as a consultant-evaluator for the North Central Association Commission on Institutions of Higher Education. He visited many college campuses across the country helping them to achieve accreditation.

    Troutt was a life member of the National Education Association and the Oklahoma Education Association. He was past president of the Oklahoma Association of Higher Education, Oklahoma Association of Secondary School Principals, Oklahoma Council on Teacher Education, Southeast District Oklahoma Education Association. He is a former chairman of the Council of Presidents of the Oklahoma State System of Higher Education. He was a member of the Phi Delta Kappa Commission on Lifelong Learning, the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, and for several years as the Oklahoma representative for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

    He wrote articles on various subjects, including school-college relations, school dropouts, college admissions policies, follow-up studies of high school graduates, preparation of teachers and nontraditional education, and a book, "Special Degree Programs for Adults."

    He was married for 60 years to the late Nancy "Ruth" Stone Troutt of Fort Worth, who preceded him death on April 27, 2003.

    Survivors include a sister, Martha Horn of Inola, Okla; two nephews and two godchildren: Valerie Bostwick Jones of Ardmore and David Bostwick of Baldwin City, Kan.

    Memorials may be made to the USAO Foundation's Roy & Ruth Troutt Fund, created to honor outstanding students through scholarships and public service awards. The Foundation's address is 1727 West Alabama, Chickasha OK 73018-5322.

    Services are under the direction of Ferguson Funeral Home of Chickasha.

  • Russian Predicts U.S. "Disintegration" by 2010

    Never happen--McCain-Palin lost, after all.--Editor

    excerpt:

    He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

    California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

    "It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

  • War Without End
    Here.

  • Poll: 75% Says 'Good Riddance' to W
    Amen. Out already....and let's seriously consider prosecuting his veep as a war criminal after they leave.--Ed.


    From CNN:

    As President George W. Bush gets ready to leave the White House in three-and-a-half weeks, and a new national poll suggests that three out of four Americans feel his departure is coming not a moment too soon.

    Seventy-five percent of those questioned in a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they're glad President Bush is going, with 23 percent indicating they'll miss him.

    "Earlier this year, Bush scored some of the lowest presidential approval ratings we've seen in half a century, so it's understandable that the public is eager for a new president to step in," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

    The three-quarters of Americans surveyed who say they won't miss Bush is 24 points higher than the 51 percent who said they wouldn't miss Bill Clinton when he left office in January 2001. Forty-five percent of those questioned at that time said they would miss Clinton.

    "As President Bush prepares to leave office, the American public has a parting thought: Good riddance. At least that's the way three-quarters feel," says CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider.

    The poll indicates that Bush has been compared poorly to his predecessors, with 28 percent saying that he's the worst ever when compared to other presidents in American history. Forty percent rate Bush as poor and 31 percent feel he's been a good president.


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