George W. Bush

The only conservative response to the Rolling Stone article about Bush I could find
There are probably more, but I gave up after about halfway through the Technorati search for the article.
John Scalzi, writing in December 2005, doesn't think that George W. Bush is the worst president ever
"The deaths of 600,000 soldiers, Union and Confederate, accrue to [James Buchanan's] account. Dubya's got a while before he gets there."

An Extraordinary Opportunity to Achieve Greatness

Sean Wilentz: “Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.”

George F. Will reflecting on George W. Bush and his nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court
He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution.
George's long, hot summer
BAG asks readers what they think the photo suggests, and I add my take.

You Chose Pussy Over Coke and Booze

Marty Beckerman, author of Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-up Session with Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace, has written an article on the 2004 United States Presidential election and it would be an understatement to say that he dislikes both candidates:

George W. Bush: Fuck you. You are an insane Jesus Freak, and I'd rather have a million Catholic priests in a million little league locker rooms than you as my president. You believe God literally tells you what to do, and this is how you decide your foreign policy. You confessed to the former Palestinian prime minister that Jesus told you to invade Iraq. You don't know jack shit about anything. You hate the Constitution, you're no better than the Taliban, you spent your life doing coke and drinking until your wife finally threatened to pack her bags, so you chose pussy over coke and booze at the reckless young age of forty. (How noble.)

Beckerman solidifies his position as the voice of Twentysomething America in the sentence that follows the above quote.

Later, about John Kerry: “You voted against Gulf War I, a war that you praised in your debates with Bush, while you voted for Gulf War II, which you've said is "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time." You keep saying, "I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president of the United States," but after your four-month tour of Vietnam, you claimed that you (and your fellow soldiers) committed atrocities to advance imperialism. So how the fuck did you defend America (unless you were defending it from Richard Nixon)? You have no consistent positions on anything. You are a man without a soul, just as Bush is a man without a mind.”

When You Attack Him For His Malaprops

Joey DeVilla points out the following quote from Ron Suskind's excellent article on the first term of George W. Bush's presidency (note my implication in the word "first"):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Joey makes fun of the quote by stating that he is a proud member of the Reality-Based Community, but his making fun of that quote misses the point. The people who support Bush could care less about any supposed arrogance, stupidity, or insanity the President might have. The following paragraph, from the same article, has lingered in my brain far more than the above paragraphs:

And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

Also must-read is Joshua Green's article on Karl Rove:

The mythologizing portrayals of a "boy genius" that characterized so much media coverage of Rove after 2000, and especially after the Republicans' triumphant sweep in the midterm elections, struck me as sorely out of date when I began this project. The Bush Administration was suffering through the worst of the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the President's approval ratings were plummeting. Clearly, there are many differences between the circumstances in which Rove has been victorious in the past and those he faces now. But that is no reason to discount his record. By any standard he is an extremely talented political strategist whose skill at understanding how to run campaigns and motivate voters would be impressive even if he used no extreme tactics. But he does use them. Anyone who takes an honest look at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado common to professional political operatives. Having studied what happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning. The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that's been written about him, Rove's fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage.

Kerry accurately quoted Bush saying that he wasn't concerned about Osama bin Laden
Not an exaggeration after all. Include Quicktime video of the debate and Bush's actual quote.

She Waited In Vain For the Sentence to Continue

Deborah Tannen: “Perhaps it was not by chance that it was a woman who asked the president, at the town hall debate last Friday, to list three instances in which he had made wrong decisions since taking office. If women react to Mr. Bush's made-no-mistake tactic the way they react to it when it is used by men in their lives, a majority may well be more angered than reassured. That's because it drives many women nuts when men won't say they made a mistake and apologize if they do something wrong. I'm reminded of a woman who was angry at her husband because she had given him an important letter to mail and he'd assured her he'd mail it, then told her the next day, "I forgot to mail your letter," and stopped there. She waited in vain for the sentence to continue, "I'm sorry." In the end, she was angry not about the letter but about the missing apology.”

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