Bush Is "Smaller Than Life"

From Frank Rich in the New York Times:

WE like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

But dammit he's done great damage for all his pinched spirit and small-mindedness. Great numbers of us (79%) here in the US will not miss him when he's gone, but we acquiesced when he proceeded to do his dirty deeds.

The one indisputable talent of his White House was its ability to create and sell propaganda both to the public and the press.

Apparently, Bush was a flim-flam artist of the highest caliber, or many here in the US were gullible and ignorant. Take your choice.

Now that bag of tricks is empty as well. Bush’s first and last photo-ops in Iraq could serve as bookends to his entire tenure.

The faked turkey for the troops at Thanksgiving that they could not eat and the shoes! Yes, the man of courage who flung the shoes. What's become of Muntazer al-Zaidi?

According to Reuters:

he trial of an Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush in Baghdad has been postponed pending an appeal over whether the incident amounted to an assault, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
....

Zaidi's lawyer Dhiaa al-Saadi told Reuters the defense was appealing to have the charge reduced to insulting a visiting head of state, which would carry a two-year maximum sentence, because throwing shoes could not have put Bush in actual danger.

The beatings he received after his arrest should be enough of a punishment. They should let him go. If he goes to prison, he will become more of a hero than he already is.

Back to Frank Rich:

Condi Rice blamed the press for the image that sullied Bush’s Iraq swan song: “That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over.” We are back where we came in. This was the same line Donald Rumsfeld used to deny the significance of the looting in Baghdad during his famous “Stuff happens!” press conference of April 2003. “Images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over,” he said then, referring to the much-recycled video of a man stealing a vase from the Baghdad museum. “Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?” he asked, playing for laughs.

Remember Rummy the rock star, the sexy homme d'un certain âge? Oh my! Such innocents we were. Such obliviousness to the disasters which would follow.

How will the world remember the two terms of Bush's presidency? He's trying to paint the picture by the numbers of his legacy for us.

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

16 days to go.