Mountaineer wrote:
MediumTex wrote:
I always hesitated to watch Oliver Stone's
W. because it looked silly. I finally watched it a couple of days ago and I was struck by how insightful it was in many small ways, especially in the way the people influencing W. were depicted as opportunistic vultures endlessly circling a wounded simpleton.
The best scene in the whole film for me was when W. had a nightmare in which his dad confronted him in the Oval Office and basically said: "Well son, it was one thing back when you were just fucking up your own life. Now, you have graduated to fucking up the whole country, including our family name and any chance your brother Jeb will ever have to be elected President. Nice work dipshit."
It hit me that W. really did put the nails in the coffin of any chance Jeb ever had of being President. Jeb never really got out from under that, and Trump freely criticized the whole Bush family in the process of finally pushing Jeb into oblivion.
It's like W. did the same thing for his party that Bill Clinton did for the Democrats, except Bush did it with his simple-mindedness, while Clinton did it with his penis.
Matt Taibbi's new piece gets into the vapors we are still inhaling from W.'s presidency, especially the way that once the bar is lowered for one moron, future morons can step forward from surprising directions.
LINK
People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn't merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting.
I wonder how he ever learned to fly an F-102 (625 hours of flight time) and survive given how dangerous it was, and graduate from Yale and get a Harvard MBA given how dumb he was? Amazing! Just amazing!
http://www.456fis.org/PRESIDENT_BUSH_&_THE_F-102.htm
... M
People speculate that Bush basically lost his nerve as a pilot, which led to his loss of interest in reserve duty, culminating in his soft desertion when he failed to report for duty after being transferred from Texas to Alabama.
So the flying thing is at best neutral, and might be an illustration that he was an idiot.
As far as Yale goes, when you're a legacy admit whose grandfather was a U.S. Senator and whose father was a war hero and upcoming politician, I don't know how challenging of an academic experience it is if you don't want it to be.
As far as the Harvard MBA goes, most MBA programs are just money makers involving 12-24 months of business courses taught more like seminars designed for everyone to finish with reasonably good grades and enhance their earning power when they go back to work. I don't put much stock in MBA programs as a measure of intellectual prowess.
What I know of W. starts with his Texas Rangers ownership, followed by his years as governor of Texas.
What I saw of him when he was part owner of the Texas Rangers seemed to be his happy spot. That "job" wasn't difficult, and even when bad decisions were made, it just manifested in the form of another crappy Texas Rangers team (the Rangers first-ever playoff appearance came two years after Bush was elected Governor). What Bush did do was provide a pleasant looking public face for an ownership group that really wanted public help with the construction of a new stadium, and Bush was pretty good in that role.
Once Bush was elected Governor, the Karl Rove influence started to come through, and Bush started seeming less like a smiley baseball executive, and more like a political marionette.
Speaking of the Rove factor, can anyone think of any other President whose campaign manager stayed with him as a close aide in the White House more or less constantly throughout his administration, advising him on a wide variety of policy matters?
I think that many people in the Republican party viewed W. as more of a symbol, sort of like a piece of Silly Putty that could be impressed with, or wrapped around, whatever was most expedient. In that role, he did a great job (it wasn't really that different from his role as the face of the Texas Rangers years earlier). As far as true leadership goes, though, I think you have to say he was a miserable failure. He broke every promise he made in the 2000 campaign to manage the growth in government and government spending. He responded in an obvious way to the 9/11 attacks (i.e., go to where the terrorists were last known to be and start shooting), but somehow got distracted from terrorism with Iraq, and for the rest of his administration the Iraq mess distracted the country from terrorism (and maybe that was its goal--who knows?). For whatever reason, though, Bush left office in 2009 with no bin Laden trophy over seven years after 9/11.
I'm thinking about Bush here more in a historical sense than in a current events sense. I think that one of the broad themes of his years in office will be "advisors gone wild" in the form of Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet and Powell. I think that another theme of his presidency will be "foreign policy foolishness", with citations to criticisms of W.'s foreign policy from Bush Sr.'s foreign policy team.
If W. had been a Democrat, the enormous growth in the size and reach of government during the W. years--especially massive foreign wars, huge increases in the national debt, and the rollout of gigantic new welfare programs--would have probably been a narrative aligning him with FDR and LBJ in American history, but as a Republican, I don't know where you are supposed to put that stuff.
One option would be to simply strip away all of the stupidity, bad decision making and hypocrisy from the W. presidency and just teach whatever was left as history. The trouble is, I don't know if there would be enough left to create any kind of coherent narrative. I guess you could say that the terrorists attacked the U.S., and Bush ordered a counterattack. Wall Street attacked the middle class, and Bush sided with Wall Street. A need for prescription drugs attacked old people, and Bush sided with the old people. Iraq didn't attack the U.S., and Bush ordered an attack on Iraq. When the Iraqis defended their country, Bush called them terrorists.
