Oh, sure… NOW, they talk!
This story on Yahoo! News has the sympathy-baiting headline, “Ex-Bush aides say he never recovered from Katrina”.
Awwww…. What a shame. Well, at least all the countless thousands who actually got dumped on by the storm are back on their feet. … What? They’re not? Oh.
I recently drove around in New Orleans (October, 2008), and I gotta tell you… The Gulf Coast is still a mess, three years on.
Dan Bartlett, one of the most publicly candid and pragmatic Bush aides I know of, is quoted in the article as having said:
Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.
Personally, I thought signing the USA PATRIOT act was the final nail in the coffin. The rest is just shovelsful of dirt piled in the dark of night on the coffin at the bottom of a shallow, unmarked grave in the woods behind Dick Cheney’s house.
Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell (someone who really got crapped on by the Bush administration), had the guts to compare Bush to Sarah Palin. That’s “compare”, not “contrast”. He likened Bush to Palin. He said they were similar in their foreign policy experience.
Larry, I’ll go you one better… Bush and Palin are also similar in their (lack of) command of the English language and “folksy bumpklin charisma”. I tend to think one can be charismatic, articulate, and sensible, but the power brokers in the Republican party seem to think that’s too much to ask.
Wilkerson also went on to say that Dick Cheney had masterminded his own selection as Vice President. While I can’t say that comes as a surprise, the official story in the press (as I’d heard it) had been that Bush had selected Cheney, but Cheney declined, and instead offered to help him find a suitable candidate. It then turned out, according to the official telling, that none of the candidates met with Bush’s approval, and Cheney reluctantly accepted the Veep nomination. Huh. Who knew Cheney was such a douche bag?
Former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, David Kuo, said that most of the senior staff at the White House were not particularly religious, and found the religious conservative leaders to be “annoying”, “insufferable”, and “pains in the butt”, but that they “had to be accommodated”. Why? Why did they have to be accommodated? Please tell me why? The President’s constituents are not only the people who voted for him. The entire population is his constituency. Yeesh.
I guess, for the next few weeks, we’re stuck with Bush administration retrospectives… The series-finale clip show, if you will, except, instead of hearing candid remarks from the main characters, we’re hearing them from minor characters we’d seen once or twice over the course of the series. I want to hear what Powell has to say! I’d love to see David Frost back Bush or Cheney into a corner!
I ain’t holdin’ my breath for it, bro.