Bush's Ghostwritten Memoirs Establish Nothing New

For the last two years, former President George W. Bush has kept away from the microphones and away from the media. He says it is out of respect to his successor, and in this regard, he is following the best traditions of ex-presidents. However, his memoirs, Decision Points, is now out, and he is on TV trying to flog the book. This journal suggests readers will prefer just about anything else, as there is nothing new in the work that 28-year-old Christopher Michel ghostwrote for Mr. Bush. The only thing that emerges was just how often events took Mr. Bush by surprise. A better title would have been Blindsided.

Indeed, Mr. Bush uses the term "blindsided" in three prominent situations. He states that he was blindsided by the revelations of Abu Ghraib. "I had no idea how graphic or grotesque the photos would be," he writes, and then says without the shame of being negligent in his duties, "The first time I saw them was on the day they were aired on '60 Minutes II'." The participle of the verb also appears in a confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department over warrantless wiretapping, suggesting he never read the lawyers' memos on the subject. Most of all, "we were blindsided by a financial crisis that had been more than a decade in the making." Does Mr. Bush remember his administration presiding over most of that decade?

On the subject of the Iraq-Nam war, Mr. Bush sticks to his guns. He feels bad that the occupying forces did not find weapons of mass destruction. He also maintains that the world is better off now that the Saddamite regime is gone. He fails to understand that the war was fought under false pretences (deliberately so or not) and that undermines American democracy and security. The next time an American president has to decide whether to use force to contain such weapons, a large segment of US society will not believe him or her. As Mr. Bush famously said, "fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again."

Domestically, Mr. Bush does deal with Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans with more candor, or perhaps it is self-awareness. "As leader of the federal government, I should have recognized the deficiencies sooner and intervened faster," says the man who also stated, "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job." At the same time, he cannot bring himself to understand that his economic policies wrecked America, perhaps permanently.

This journal loathed all 8 years of the Bush occupation of the White House, but fairness demands credit where it is due, and in his African policy, he made one proud to be an American. The President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) which distributed antiretroviral drugs to keep people with HIV alive at a cost of $15 billion was money well spent. "I hoped it would serve as a medical version of the Marshall Plan," he writes. Some 4 million Africans were HIV positive before Pepfar and just 50,000 were getting antiretroviral drugs to treat the condition. When he left office, about 2 million were getting the drugs, almost 2 million lives saved.

Mr. Bush, contrary to what many of his critics say, is not a stupid man, but rather is generally incurious and intellectually lazy. Consequently, he operates from his gut rather than his brain most of the time. His administration was a disaster as a result. What is most appalling is that his African initiative showed a glimpse of what might have been after 9/11 -- a muscular foreign policy tempered by compassion, and America working with the support of the world community borne of sympathy for that one day and out of admiration for what American can achieve when listening to the angels of its better nature. Instead to protect freedom, he gave the world Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo.

© Copyright 2010 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.

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