The End of Bush's Ascendency

For me, any pretense that President Bush was serious about doing something with his presidency ended with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the disgraceful outing of Valerie Plame as a way of diverting attention from the truth about Iraq: the truth being that the inner circle of the Bush Administration had manipulated intelligence to build a phony case for war. It's now three years later and Howard Fineman, in Newsweek, writes about George W. Bush and his relationship to Kenneth Lay:

If you want a date to mark the beginning of the end of the Bush era in American life, you may as well make it this one: May 25, 2006. The Enron jury in Houston didn’t just put the wood to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The jurors took a chainsaw to the moral claims of the Texas-based corporate culture that had helped fuel the rise to power of President George W. Bush.

Unlike many critics of the Bush Administration, I suppose I'm actually grateful that the mainstream media has finally come around to recognize Bush for what he is: a failed president who tried to use public relations to create a reality that was never there. In essence, that's very much the story of Enron: a Texas pipeline company that went way beyond its original business and prided itself on 'creative' concepts that could never live up to the hype. One of the ironies of Enron is that it sold the pipeline portion of its business a few years before it went under. The pipeline business was considered boring by the corporate wunderkind but it was one of Enron's few assets that wasn't an illusion.

Fineman fails to mention that Enron and its executives were very generous campaign contributors to Bush and the Republicans and that America's oil sector donated far more money to the Republican Party than to the Democrats in recents years, Enron included. Actually I suppose I ought to be disappointed that Mr. Fineman largely spends the rest of his article backing away somewhat from the assertion of his first paragraph—but that paragraph will go into the history books.

People like me don't write those books but there will be a number of emblematic moments in the Bush Administration that will always be remembered in terms of Bush's failures. The grandstanding and arrogant strutting on the Abraham Lincoln will always be one of those moments; Bush seemed utterly unaware how little he understood the situation in Iraq and how damaging his case for war was to our nation's credibility and to his presidency.

Then there are the multiple images of Bush failing to deal with Hurricane Katrina; they were painful to watch as the nation witnessed a president struggling to keep up with his job while incompetent political appointees Bush should never have hired added to the blunders.

And understandable accident though it may have been, Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face recalled all too well an incompetent administration that had literally been described before the accident as the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

History books are also written by the rest of the world and the most shocking image demonstrating the Bush disaster, the image that will last, was one of an Iraqi detainee standing on a box connected to disturbing-looking wires, with arms outstretched and a hood on his head; this was not the America the world thought it knew; it was certainly not the one admired for being the leader of the free world.

Bush's public relations skills took him far but, lacking anything beyond that, those skills have cost our nation dearly. And the cost keeps climbing. And the illusion that neocons and right wingers have anything useful to offer our country is finished.