Sorry, Mr. President, But Your Legacy Is More Awful Than You Think

Rest assured, Mr. President, that despite what you told the Times Online today you won't be remembered solely as a war mongering president.

"Look, I think that in retrospect, you know, I could have used a different tone."

Different tone? Ya think?

War mongering is a significant aspect of your legacy, but I think we can conclude, and without much debate, that your legacy will also be one of criminality, failure and a degree of incompetence rarely achieved by any American president, much less one whose deficit of character is rivaled only by his nearly unprecedented lack of humility in the face of his unprecedented roster of inadequacies.

Sorry.

As it turns out, you won't have much control over your legacy and the history of your administration anyway. You might have some cursory input, but no-one really takes you seriously anymore and anything you put forth will be taken as just another work of fiction; another bit of propaganda.

Your legacy will ultimately be written by those of us who have been actively documenting your presidency in real time -- millions of voices authoring the narrative of your awful regime and preserving it with digital clarity one trespass at a time.

And everywhere we look, we can plainly observe your smirking, affectless footprint.

Death, poverty, war, pain, ignorance, blind patriotism, joblessness, and abandoned homes. And guess what? We're writing it down on the Internets. Your history, Mr. President, is being written at this very moment by those of us who are watching our homes collapse in value and our friends and relatives sent to places like Ramadi and Fallujah and, in some cases, Walter Reed or worse. Your history, Mr. President, isn't going to be settled and published decades from now. It's being published immediately and without the fog of memory to obscure the ugly details.

These ugly details are exhaustively researched and easily accessible.

And as they congeal into a single eight-year narrative, it's my hunch that every tragedy experienced during this dark ride will be regarded as a means to a specific end: your election to a second term and the election of successors who will carry on with your sinister tradition. The centerpiece of this tradition -- the throughline of your presidential narrative -- has been, simply put, endless war for the sake of re-election.

In fact (and contrary to your present lamentation) you wanted war even before you took office. War, by your own definition, would all but guarantee a second presidential term. You told your pre-2000 autobiographer, Mickey Herskowitz:

"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief... My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it...If I have a chance to invade...if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

Four years later, as you ramped up your re-election campaign, you told Tim Russert:

"I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind."

You didn't sound ashamed of your tone back then -- when you were running for your second term. Everything you managed to accomplish during your presidency was directed towards maintaining this manufactured "war president" façade. Without it, you would have been either defeated in 2004 or impeached a long time ago.

So how did you do it? History will show that you bought off the American people with $300 checks and massive tax cuts for Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney. You ruthlessly exploited the deadliest foreign attack on American soil and, subsequently, terrorized this nation and its corporate media into giving you more latitude than you otherwise deserved. You attempted to dumb down our public schools because, in your view, an educated electorate is a dangerous electorate -- less susceptible to war mongering and propaganda, right? You ignored the destruction of an entire American city because the majority of its residents probably didn't vote for you or contribute to your campaign for war in the first place. And your entire foreign policy has been constructed around deliberately inciting anti-American sentiment, thus fueling more war.

It turns out, Mr. President, that your only success is something which you appear to be walking back: your war mongering -- your cynical, self-serving and bloody "bring 'em on" legacy -- and, with it, your re-election in 2004.

If you were half the man your dwindling supporters claim that you are, you would own this actual legacy of yours, Mr. President.

If you were a better man, you would own the horror you've created for yourself and generations of Americans to come. You would take responsibility for more than your pathetic "tone" and "rhetoric" -- you would take responsibility for all of it: the lies, the casualties, the mistakes, the crimes and the cover-ups. Instead you're presently flying around the world saying that you "wanted to solve this ... in a diplomatic fashion" when we all know, based on numerous reports from insiders ranging from Scott McClellan to Richard Clarke that this is simply not true.

The historical record of your presidency has unequivocally verified that, even now as you attempt to Windex the crap off your legacy, you're lying about the war. But what's worse is that your administration's objective of fostering endless American warfare continues in Iraq and elsewhere while being endorsed by Senator McCain who has hugged-out any conflicts he might have had with your policies. And, if you and Senator McCain are lucky, the corporate media will crack open its Election Year Mad Libs script and paint Senator Obama as somehow more dangerous to the future of America than you ever were.

Your legacy, Mr. President, isn't just about war mongering. We're going to see to it that your legacy is almost entirely about how you lied us into an unnecessary war as part of an almost unspeakably horrible strategy for re-election -- as a way to mask over your inadequacies as a leader and to somehow delude future Americans into believing that your two-term presidency deserves special renown.

So good luck with all of that "different tone" crap. It's not going to work. Sorry.

Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog! GO!

Comments

[cindyw]

Bush is banking on the hope that history will view him more kindly than we do today. I'm about the same age as he is, and my fondest wish is that both he and I live long enough to see him go down as the worst president in American history.

[JessWonderin]

Come January 2008 your dream will come true.

[DumbDad]

No, Bob. You 'ascribe to malice what is better acknowledged to be incompetence.' He just wasn't qualified for any kind of real work, but the aura of the Office left his administration unable to see clearly. The result was that conniving bastards sought their wickedly self-serving purposes unaware that they were unbalanced by ANY constructive governmental authority, and insecure true-believers made it up as they went along. In Katrina they really thought it was better to send federal bucks to companies than to government officials, and they got eaten alive. In Iraq they really thought an invasion was going to be necessary one day, and they lied to get it to happen when they thought they could do it cheap. They really thought they were going to be blamed for 9/11 and worse if it happened again and they really thought the Constitution was out of touch with their duties. They really thought their Prez's indifference to knowledge meant that debate was useless. They really thought what mattered was the next election. They really were the worst in history. But W's sin was less than those of the ones who put him up for election.

[Swedishgal]

Or those who were dumb enough to vote for him a second time.

[acv]

Good Post Bob - you're totally on target You should think about doing a Post on how Bush/Cheney looked at OUR Consitution and instead of saying, "How do we uphold this," they said, "How do we get around this?" They have eroded the foundation of this country and the very principles that set us apart from the rest of the world.

Someone mentioned this before but I think it's important - We need to tell our elected officails to hold this Administraion accountable for thier actions. Democrats who look the other way instead of demanding accountability are also guilty of violating the principles this country was founded on.

[the964kid]

I think he will ranked at the very bottom because of the combination of massive failures that affected so many negatively. Whether its decreases in jobs, houses, failing economy, criminality, failure to respond to disaster, war mongering and so much more, Bush will have more items in the 'loser' column then any other President ever.

I look forward to buying the Bush Presidency post mortems that will be come out quickly in 2009. And with them will be the beginning of cementing his failures in history forever.

[LeftLeanWing]

and most importantly

Bush just looks dumber than a box of 1cent stamps. He also speaks as if he is explaining things to kids in primary school during an assembly.




.
"I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah."
—Bush at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, Washington, D.C., Dec. 10, 2001

[druidlady42]

BRAVO, Mr. Cesca! BRAVO!

The only thing you left out is that most members of our clueless, compliant, cowardly, complicit Congress aided and abetted this national Disgrace-i­n-Chief,--­--and shamefully continue to do so!

[Ephemera]

Excellent article.

[ultrabop]

He's our first serial killer president. It started in Texas:

Feb. 4, 2000 | While Illinois Gov. George Ryan announced a death-penalty moratorium this week, Gov. George W. Bush's home team is publishing nearly every grisly detail of its execution records online. Like a macabre, taxpayer-funded "FBI's Most Wanted" for the Internet crowd, the site catalogs the last meals and final statements of 206 men and women executed in Texas since 1982, 119 since Bush took office in 1995. -- Salon

...and is still going on in Iraq, Guantamano Bay and various rendition centers around the world.

[petzl]

This was a wonderful take-down of Our Dear Decider, however,
when he talks about Bush not having a say in whether history
decides he is fit or unfit, Cesca is mistaken.

The propaganda machinery of the right, who stick to Bush like
grim death because they can't bear to admit or believe just
how flagrantly and chronically wrong they have been, will
beat the drum for Bush's great legacy for years to come.

(Imagine if a democrat had gotten us into this elective war,
how loud and unremitting would have been the cries from
the right-- and justifiably so. Its just amazing the hypocrisy
we see day in and day out from the likes of FoxNews, et al.
as the hagiography of Bush goes on and on.)

[vfx]

It's been determined that Bush needs to get his favorabilty ratings up to 40 percent in order to get another Repubican in office. GW is running around trying to shore up his numbers for the sake of the party.

[CFAmick]

I've been thinking... I think we need to go the opposite route and talk about how great Bush is, and how his leagacy will be America's greatest president, just so he doesn't attack Iran.

[demright]

One of my favorites is how he was envious of the soldiers who were fighting. Kind of romantic!
Under every Bush there is dirt. Under this one is pure manure.

[schmuckwithearlaps]

Reading your post, one would think the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were never 'bombed' in 2001.

[situationcritical]

Reading your post one would think Iraq bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

[schmuckwithearlaps]

Yes, I know Iraq did not bomb the WTC. However, I commend to you Ann Coulter's column this week on anncoulter.com She makes the best defense of Bush that can be made at the moment. I think Bush has been the worst president in my memory, and I remember them all since Harry Truman. The bottom line is that we can't ignore 9-11. It happened and Bush and his guys and gals were incompetent as hell. On the other hand, I truly believe that if 9-11 never happened none of Bush's excesses would have gone anywhere near as far as they did.

[renoir]

Reading your post, one would think that you are systematically ignoring every response to those two horrors that this President gleefully embraced.

[oberon123]

You forgot to add:
"9/11 changed everything"
"They hate us for our freedom"
and the ever popular, "We are fighting them over there, so we dont have to fight them over here"

[MacTheBlogger]

I hope you're wrong.

I hope I'm wrong.

I hope it turns out that things turn around completely and miraculously, and that this hideous war turns out to have been the right thing to do.

I hope the families of the brave soldiers who have lost their lives in this insane mess will one day feel that it was all worth it. I hope the soldiers who returned missing various body parts and/or continue to suffer from various psychogical maladies one day feel it was all worth it.

I hope the other historically destructive costs of this war -- to our economy and our international reputation & validity -- one day turn out to have been worth it.

Even if it makes W look like a genius, I hope I'm wrong. I hope he's right.

In a year that will give us a president who is running on the notion of "hope", I suppose I can hope for anything. Right?

[mamacat]

I think that it will contribute to the McCain chances mightily that the educational level in this country has been steadily deteriorating for decades. To paraphrase Karl Rove, the more educated a voter, the more likely that they will vote Democratic.
Listening to McCain, Bush, and Cheny, I am truly shocked that such developmentally challenged people could have ever risen to the positions in government that they have. They do not demontrate an emotional compassion for their fellow humans, nor the ability or willingness to negotiate with others. They demonstrate a supreme willingness to rely on the power of the gun, and forget the power of goodwill. They do not realise it, of course, but they represent the worst impulses in mankind.

They claim to be standing up for the defence of Western civilisation, but do not realise that by abandoning our principles, in order to preserve our principles, that they have become a greater threat to democracy than the foes they have waged war on. "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

[Swedishgal]

True that! What conservative Repubs don't understand is that it takes work to be a liberal. You actually have to think to be a liberal. Conservative beliefs appeal to a person's basic instincts, you know like animals. Fear is what live in daily. When a person tells that they are conservative, the first thing that comes to mind is that this is incredibly selfish and self centered and believes the world revolves around them and to hell with everybody else and I know they're this way because I used to be a conservative Repub until I went to college and PAID ATTENTION to what was being taught in history, humanities, world religions and philosophies, and economics. Watching C-SPAN was an eye opener also. These people in the White House are morally bankrupt and intellectually challenged. I agree that we need to do something about our education system but my son gives me hope that kids are paying attention because every school he has been to since elementary has had mock voting days and the Democrats always win.

[gerireig]

Bob: May I humbly suggest that it takes two to tango? A sociopath won't stop until he's stopped. It's plain to see what the Republicans are about, but what about the "opposition party"? Nancy Pelosi forbids John Conyers to do what the Constitution demands. We know we have criminals. It's when the cops back away that is mortifying. Roll away that log, Bob. Tell us what the worms are doing.

[Swedishgal]

That's true too. Laws without enforcement mean nothing.