Feeding The Fish

Bush gives up golf to share the pain of the families of dead soldiers.

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”

If you made this guy up you’d be accused of being unrealistic.

Looks like Terence Blacker is going to miss Bush! I’m afraid he’s alone there.

Bush may have made some terrible decisions but, as a politician, he had things to recommend him. All too human in his social and verbal clumsiness, he has offered the world a brief respite from those bright, shiny faces of the practised politicians who are worked so perfectly by the mighty party machines behind them. For all their talk of change, the presidential candidates represent a return to smooth, professional politics after an interval of sometimes hilarious, often catastrophic amateurism.

When Richard Nixon slunk away from public life, he snarled at the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.” Bush, in many ways as discredited a figure, will doubtless leave as he arrived, with that stunned, gee-shucks-am-I-really-President? look on his face, but the message could be the same. For liberal opinion, he has been too easy a target over the past few years.

Perhaps it was good to have someone so fallible in charge for a while. Those who have bemoaned the age of spin-doctors and have complained that there is not enough personality in our leaders will at last understand that smooth, safety-first technocrats have something to recommend them.

The rest of us might even one day look back with fondness to the days when a normal, flawed human being was in the White House.

So the jist of that is, sure he did a lot of things that some liberals might consider to be, well, evil but he was a good laugh right?

I’m afraid to say I won’t miss George Bush. This is a man who it is easy to say lowered the standard of political discourse, ruined America’s worldwide reputation and undeniably made the world a less safe place to live.

This is a man who doesn’t understand that Congress writes the law and he either vetos or enforces them. As President he has no power to declare he won’t obey certain sections of law as he has done by writing hundreds of signing statements, and this was whilst REPUBLICANS controlled Congress! What a rebel!

This is a man who’s administration outed one of their own spies to silence a critic. What a maverick!

This is a man who pushed through incredibly expensive wars and tax cuts at the same time, grew the federal budget by 7% a year (double Clinton’s 3.5%) and then accused Democrats of fiscal irresponsibility! Oh George, what a character you are!

This is a man who after using discredited evidence and lies to sell the Iraq war to the world, causes thousands of deaths, creates millions of refugees and made the world less safe from terrorism made JOKES about his inability to find WMDs. How quirky! What a personality! How unlike normal politicians! How unlike a human being.

This is a man who is now telling Congress that if they don’t retroactively give immunity to telecoms companies who his administration told to break the law and spy on normal Americans, the terrorists win. Never mind the fact that if the Bill is this important it could pass without the immunity, and he as President could use his power of pardon to the same effect. Never mind the fact that all that’s needed to make these wiretaps legal is a warrent, which they can get after the fact. In order to do what they say is necessary to protect America, all they need to do is let someone else know at some point who and why. What delightfully secretive people! I’m sure there’s a word for people who use the threat of terror to reach their goals….nah, go on, it’ll come back to me.

But hey, it’s over soon right? The worst we can do next year is McCain and he’s such a maverick how can he not be alright? Oh, except perhaps the one thing that made him the least repulsive of the Republican candidates, his opposition to the US using torture, disappeared the other night when he voted against banning the CIA to use waterboarding - something he himself has described as torture. Oh John, you so wacky!

Oh yes, We laugh at Bush, because otherwise we’d have to cry. It’s a laughter of despair and disbelief that the last 7 years happened at all. No, I really not going to miss George Bush.