A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald Read Free Book Online Page A

dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war.
It’s a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in “Bush at War,” his 2002 book, which depicted the president—in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed—as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the “vision thing” his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

Thus, while the Bush in Woodward’s 2002 depiction is an admirable man of resolve, by 2006 the president is a profoundly flawed “prisoner of his own certitude.”
As 2006 drew to a close, Tony Blankley, a Washington Times editor and former press spokesman to Newt Gingrich, described the president’s predicament as one of great loneliness, abandoned even by most of his prior supporters, and under attack from all precincts:

The American presidency has been called “A Glorious Burden” by the Smithsonian Museum, and the loneliest job in the world by historians. As we approach Christmas 2006 Anno Domini, President Bush is surely fully seized of the loneliness and burden of his office.
For rarely has a president stood more alone at a moment of high crisis than does our president now as he makes his crucial policy decisions on the Iraq War. His political opponents stand triumphant, yet barren of useful guidance. Many—if not most—of his fellow party men and women in Washington are rapidly joining his opponents in a desperate effort to save their political skins in 2008. Commentators who urged the president on in 2002–03, having fallen out of love with their ideas, are quick to quibble with and defame the president.

Blankley is one of the remaining few who admire Bush, yet even his depiction of the formerly cocksure and powerful president as an abandoned and lonely figure is almost pity inducing.
And on Fox News, long an outpost of pro-Bush loyalty, the prowar, generally pro-Bush Mort Kondrake appeared the day after Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address and summarized the Bush legacy as follows:

In this world in which we live, the chances are that unless something miraculous happens, that George Bush is going to leave us with a world in which everything’s a mess and we’ve got to restore our likeability in the world without losing our leadership capacity.

And in the wake of the growing scandal in March 2007 involving the administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys, conservative pundit Bob Novak—noting that virtually nobody, including House Republicans, was defending the president—made this rather startling observation in his syndicated column:

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress—not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment [emphasis added].

THROWING BUSH OVERBOARD
B ush’s unpopularity has become so intense and toxic that self-identified political conservatives have taken to distancing themselves from Bush by insisting he was never really a “conservative” at all. In the aftermath of the 2006 midterm elections, the New York Times reported:

Since the election, a chorus from the right has been noisily distinguishing between conservative and Republican, blaming deviation from conservative principles for the election losses. From George Will to Rush Limbaugh, conservatives cut loose with criticisms of the Republicans for spending too much at home and getting bogged down in Iraq.

The day following the election, Rush Limbaugh assured his conservative audience: “Liberalism didn’t win anything yesterday; Republicanism lost. Conservatism was nowhere to be found except on the Democratic side.” Writing in National Review , Jonah Goldberg in 2006 actually went so far as to claim that Bush is a “liberal” Republican: “But there is