Thought Junior Would Listen To Reason Did You?
The break happened not long after a boozy election-night wake for Blount, who lost his Senate bid to the incumbent Democrat, John Sparkman. Leaving the election-night "celebration," Allison remembers encountering George W. Bush in the parking lot, urinating on a car, and hearing later about how he’d yelled obscenities at police officers that night. Bush left a house he’d rented in Montgomery trashed — the furniture broken, walls damaged and a chandelier destroyed, the Birmingham News reported in February. "He was just a rich kid who had no respect for other people’s possessions," Mary Smith, a member of the family who rented the house, told the newspaper, adding that a bill sent to Bush for repairs was never paid. And a month later, in December, during a visit to his parents’ home in Washington, Bush drunkenly challenged his father to go "mano a mano," as has often been reported.
Around the same time, for the 1972 Christmas holiday, the Allisons met up with the Bushes on vacation in Hobe Sound, Fla. Tension was still evident between Bush and his parents. Linda was a passenger in a car driven by Barbara Bush as they headed to lunch at the local beach club. Bush, who was 26 years old, got on a bicycle and rode in front of the car in a slow, serpentine manner, forcing his mother to crawl along. "He rode so slowly that he kept having to put his foot down to get his balance, and he kept in a weaving pattern so we couldn’t get past," Allison recalled. "He was obviously furious with his mother about something, and she was furious at him, too
They put a whining rich man’s brat, full of self pity and a grandiose sense of his own entitlement into the White House. They picked him because they knew he appealed to a large swath of their base: small minded bigots also full of self pity and a grandiose sense of their own entitlement. Then, to their growing apprehension, he put his hands on the levers of the most powerful economy and military in the world and proceeded to act like a whining rich man’s brat, full of self pity and a grandiose sense of his own entitlement. Did they think he would stop now that he’s left a staggering trail of wreckage and lost American lives in his path? You don’t understand. The man who couldn’t even bring himself to say the words "shame on me" while reciting the old proverb, "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" is not to blame. It’s never his fault. Nothing is ever his fault…
Nine days after Zelikow’s resignation the Iraq Study Group report was released. Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the report "a flaming turd," but his colorful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection. Still, Scowcroft and Baker, like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot," waited for Rice.
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The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report.
Rice was supposed to be the one to get Junior to see reality. But it seems she’s sized him up a tad better then the Wise Old Men of Washington. He’s going to do what he damn well pleases, and throughout his life everyone who has ever known him knows this one fact above all else: you’re either with him or against him. Loyalty to junior doesn’t mean you tell him what he doesn’t want to hear when he needs to hear it anyway. It means you flatter him, agree with everything he says and does, and most of all, take the blame for him when he makes a mess of things. Rice probably figured, correctly, that siding with the Wise Old Men of Washington now would incure junior’s wrath. Junior does not tolerate disloyalty.
Rice, who had fallen into radio silence, canceling a scheduled speech on "transformational diplomacy," finally intervened. When the U.S. military commanders in Iraq and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad protested against a rush by the Iraqi government to hang Saddam Hussein, Rice overrode their objections and gave the signal to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to proceed.
Maliki’s management and subsequent defense of the gruesome circus surrounding Saddam’s execution disabused any illusion that he could act in the larger Iraqi national interest rather than as a political representative of Shiite sectarianism. He is to his marrow a creature of the Dawa Party, founded by Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, and his alliance with al-Sadr. While the intent of the surge is to revitalize the Maliki government, that government cannot and does not wish to be reformed. The problem is not merely that Maliki is a weak political leader, or that his political coalition wouldn’t permit it, or that his Iranian sponsors wouldn’t allow repudiation — all of which are indisputably true. The irreducible reason is that Maliki exists only to achieve Shiite control, and if he did not he would not exist. There is no other Maliki. Nor can Bush invent one.
But none of this matters. What an escalation will do is give junior time to do what he has done all throughout his life, pass the problem onto someone else. First there will be his troop buildup. Then it has to be given time to work. And by the time it’s staringly obvious to even a brick that it isn’t working, the next election cycle will be upon us. Bush can claim that he’s left a structure in place that will lead to success in Iraq and bring peace to the middle east…if only the new administration follows it. And then he’s out the door, and shed of the consequences. The blame for loosing Iraq will belong to the next administration, to someone else. At least, he can always say so. And so can his loyal base. Someone else is always to blame. But that’s not what you should be paying attention to…
The Wise Old Men of Washington…the power brokers…the insiders…and their ass kissing media sycophants…the ones who cherry picked him to be the republican nominee in 2000. The ones who figured he’d be their boy, appeal to the base, and usher in a permanent republican majority. They thought he would take the escape hatch they built for him. They thought he would take the chance they offered him to withdraw and save face. They thought he would listen to them. They really thought he would listen to them.
