Essay: I can't feel pity for Bush

[Jack Rabbit]

George W. Bush's final days in office are spent in a whirlwind of his reminiscences on his tenure in office. He would like us to see him as a great president who, like Truman, was unappreciated in his own time but soon came to be seen as one willing to make tough choices that turned out to be right.

There was nothing right about the response to Hurricane Katrina. There was nothing right about firing US Attorneys for not being crooked enough to file bogus charges. There was nothing right about torturing individuals detained in the war on terror. And even if invading Iraq turns out to be a better idea than it appears to be now, there was no excuse for lying about the threat Iraq posed not just to the United States but to Iraq's weakest neighbor.

It's too much of a stretch to see Bush as well-meaning.

At other times we are being asked to feel pity for well-meaning a man for whom nothing worked right. We're not taking about Bush, are we? There is nothing to pity about Bush. {i]Pity is a cathartic emotion elicited by literature and specifically in classical tragedy. The tragic hero was a noble person, a great man of enormous talents and virtues who is laid low by a fault in his own character. Shakespeare's tragic hero is a man who is wise and virtuous in many respects, but has a blind spot that makes him gullible to certain people who do not have the hero's best interests in mind (such as Othello with Iago or King Lear to Edmund, Goneril and Regan), to underestimate the prowess of the villain (such as Hamlet with Claudius), or to be propelled by a character flaw to commit an infamous act which proves to be his undoing (such as the ambitious Macbeth).

Bush is not Hamlet, Othello, Lear or Macbeth. There is no nobility in his character. Bush is no tragic hero. He does not inspire pity.

I could feel pity for Bush if he had a prior record of some distinction, or if had made a principled stand even if I personally disagreed with it, and then had his disastrous presidency befall us and him. I could feel sorry for him if I thought he really believed all that crap he was using to justify going to war against Iraq or if he really believed it was a war to liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny rather than their mineral rights.

Bush is a man with no record of distinction in public service or in private business, who "won" two disputed presidential elections (he most definitely lost in 2000), who had to know of the bona fide doubts about the intelligence he used to lead us to war, who promoted those who toed the party line in falsely justifying that war and punished those who were less than enthusiastic about it, who fought the Iraqi government to allow greedy western oil corporations back to Iraq.

I feel pity for Herbert Hoover. Hoover was humanitarian (see his work for famine relief during and after World War I) and an able administrator (it wasn't for nothing that he was asked to head a commission for government reform by presidents from each party). He would likely have made an excellent president at any time in American except at the onset of the Great Depression, something that by ideological bent he was reluctant to fight in the way it needed to be fought. A man such as Hoover would never have botched the response to Hurricane Katrina as Bush did. Hoover would never have lied us into war as Bush did. Hoover would never have fired US Attorneys for failing to file prosecutions they knew to be bogus, and he would never have asked them to do it as Bush did.

Hoover was a tragic figure who spent his later years too proud to ask for pity. There is nothing about Bush that evokes pity. As president, or the usurper who acted as president, he was what he had always been: a failure. That he would fail as president was predictable. That a man who kept the council of Karl Rove would a dishonest leader who would try to shroud himself in a thin layer of false courage, false wisdom and even omniscience was predictable.

There may be a dramatic transformation of Bush from the beginning to the end of his tenure in office. He came in as a clown and leaves as a grotesque villain. There is nothing to pity.

For now, he will slither back to Texas.

[glowing]

1. You mean Houston.. Crawford was a stage set bought in 1999 to make

him look more like a cowboy. A cowboy who is afraid of horses.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. It's actually Dallaas, isn't it?

Ok, I covered all three.

Thanks.

[firedupdem]

2. Great Essay...

I watched the Frontline documentary on Lee Atwater and it was clear to see where Bush and his cronies learned all their nasty tricks. They have done a smash up job of almost destroying this country and have made us almost hated in other countries.

I have no pity for him either. Rich punks running the country are never a good idea. He was a disaster from the beginning and never should have been president.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Excellent piece, though I feel it'll get swamped in GDP today

Still, this'll kick it back up, for more visibility. Would you submit this to anywhere outside DU? My only criticism is that it's a bit 'preaching to the choir' here.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. Self-important kick

:bounce: