Bush's Oval Office chat yesterday was reminiscent of meetings he held last summer with what I called Bush's Optimists Club. Back then, he summoned right-wing talk-show hosts as well as conservative columnists to hear him insist that he was still feeling sunny.
As I wrote in a January column, Bush's Messiah Complex, Bush has started speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered -- and it turns out the president sees himself as a heroic figure.
And in a February column, Bush: Clueless and Happy, I noted that Bush seemed unaware of what a drag he'll be on the Republican ticket.
The secret to Bush's giddiness? He's apparently mistaking Bush fatigue for Bush acceptance.
And we'll link you to something that will not appear in the dead-tree version of the WaPo until next Sunday's edition. Any Washingtonians out there who can give us an idea of how much the Sunday WaPo weighs?
But as many veterans of the Bush administration have made clear, the president's CEO style has more to do with a fanatical punctuality (he once locked Powell, his first-term secretary of state, out of a Cabinet meeting because he was running late, according to McClellan) than true resolve. This picture of an indecisive, ineffectual leader is being painted not by the predictable Bush haters but by his own former aides -- career civil servants and political appointees alike. After reading "War and Decision," the new memoir from the arch-neoconservative Douglas J. Feith, former assistant secretary of defense Bing West quipped in the National Review that the former Pentagon aide's book should have been titled "War and Indecision" -- perhaps a fitting epitaph for the Bush era.The most colossal cluster fuck in American presidential history. Aren't you glad you were there to see it?
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