January 15, 2009: Farewell to the Chief
Thursday, January 15th, 2009In a few minutes, our outgoing Commander in Chief will give his final televised address to the nation.
I’ll be here instead, messing with iTunes, because I simply cannot sit through another session of mugging and smirking while he tries to spin the disasters of the last eight years into some bizarre ‘legacy of achievement.’
Honestly, I think the guy is so impossibly dense that he lacks to capacity to understand job what a lousy job he’s done. Not long ago he stated that the US had the ‘best health care system in the world.’ Yeah, last I heard, we were ranked 38th. But I don’t think Dubya knows that – all he knows is that he saw a doctor regularly, so why shouldn’t everybody else? And that is the limit of his awareness.
In an interview last week, he mentioned that hanging that infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign behind him while he preened on the deck of the carrier was maybe a mistake.
Think about that. He started a war that never should have happened, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead, American soldiers are dead, the Middle East is a seething, gun-toting mess, and the US lost much of its international standing – but Dubya can’t see all that. What mattered, really mattered, to him was that his sign made him look like an idiot.
I think that incident sums the whole Bush presidency up pretty well. It’s as if the captain of the Titanic expressed deep remorse that those brand new deck chairs got soaked when the Titanic went down.
Cheney and his cronies were, I’m sure, pulling the actual strings. And while they’re certainly vicious and amoral enough, they were never really all that bright. These guys had the resources of the entire US government at their (clawed) fingertips, but instead of learning about Sunni and Shia or any of the geopolitical history of the region, they decided they could charge in one Shock-N-Awe weekend, make Iraq a US state by Monday, and gain access to all that lovely, lovely oil no later than lunch on Tuesday.
We all know how that worked out. Honestly, Cheney and crew should have hired a DC Comics author so they could run their evil plans past him. I bet any one of them would have burst out laughing at the “and then we’ll be welcomed as heroes, because everybody loves getting carpet-bombed!” line. At least the comic book writers have some experience with the wicked plots of evil masterminds. You never saw the Joker’s schemes wind up going this badly.
But soon, they’ll all be gone. Bush will finally face his mental match by clearing all that brush down in Crawford. Cheney will flap his way to his nearest secret lair, where he’ll spend his declining years cackling maniacally as he descends upon yet another hapless petting zoo. Rumsfeld will squint his way into obscurity, Condoleeza Rice will write a book so mind-numbingly boring they won’t even bother to print any text past the third page, and every surviving Bush Press Secretary will probably need therapy just from being forced to defend everything from Iraq to Bush’s ill-advised back-rubs of reluctant Germans.
I just hope the new guy can somehow pick up the pieces and repair the worst of the damage. I don’t envy you, President Obama. I used to hate working the last shift at the deli – the floors would be covered with dropped food items, the sinks were always overflowing, all the displays and saws and racks were dirty and everything was stacked five feet high and needing to be washed.
But you – sheesh, it looks like a circus whirled through and let the gorillas loose and they used live clowns as clubs in an eight-way primate bash-fest that eventually included the elephants, the goats, and all the booze-swilling roustabouts. What this place needs, sir, is a bulldozer, and every mop in town.