"Bush in Winter"

Last wk. we decided to give Jonah Goldbrick a pass, as (much like the proverbial stopped clock that's correct twice a day) he got something more or less right, actually exposing some of Pat Buchanan's racist clap-trap, in Buchanan's latest book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: Why We Should Have Let Hitler Alone, At Least Until He Finished Off The Jews. This wk., though, time has moved on & J. G. is back to bullshit. We can only take so much, & even given the contempt we have for our audience, we can only submit you poor souls to so much, so let's just note this:

Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency. Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.

Which "Breaking news!" Goldfinger then admits is only

what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.

Can't wait for that book, filled w/ maddening & foolish punctuation, & not revealing anything but what a maddening fool G. W. is. (Speaking of punctuation, the very best Bush book would be one he had to write himself, on a strict deadline, sans ghostwriters. He can't talk, he surely can't punctuate either. That would be one hee-larious book.)

In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.

Sure they will. And there's nothing resembling imaginative and hyper-partisan caterwauling & bleating on the right, or among Bush's few remaining defenders, is there? Not to mention that only a fraction of what Bush ever says is accurate. The best part is Jonah's idea of "the mainstream of American presidential history," & how the Bush presidency just isn't that radical. To young Goldberg, presidential history goes all the way back to...George H.W. Bush.

Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.

No mention at all of, say, Reagan, selling arms to Iran & helping Osama Bin Laden get Al Qaeda underway (as Bush Jr. is doing now in Iran, per the Seymour Hersh piece mentioned here yesterday). Just Bush the First & Clinton. He doesn't even qualify his "idea" w/ a word like"modern." If it happened before he pulled his head out of Star Drek reruns, it doesn't matter. And his conclusion?

Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.

Idiocy of this caliber stands on its own, & needs no further comment from an insignificant nobody (Not published in a major metropolitan newspaper.) like the editor here.