
"Mission Accomplished."This is dedicated to my pal
paladin3, who had posted two quotables. The first one was that if he could have voted for GWB a third term, he would have, and just yesterday, he suggested in his twitter summary "Let's all change our icons to GWB on Tuesday."
Well, I never had a GWB icon, and getting one on Tuesday probably isn't going to happen. But in lieu of that I present this, a fond farewell to the person who did so much to get us so far.
It will be years before we can really fully assess what this administration has done for/to the world. The early returns have come in, and the numbers aren't pretty. But, let's not be too hasty. Maybe the angst of 2008 is tinging the view of what REALLY happened.
People are already talking about the visionary GWB was for setting up a democracy in the Middle East, and how that may change everything about the region, somewhere down the road. It's possible, but is it likely?
Really, here's the issue about the presidency in general, and GWB's version of it specifically, and I'll try to go through with a bare minimum of bashing, since I have basically been doing that these past 8 years.
Being the President of the United States offers an opportunity to do many things. GWB just didn't do them. He appointed his pals to be cabinet members, and various other crucial posts, then watched as they all managed to not do their jobs, especially when the work needed to get done. This, more than anything changed what could have been. Had Bush assigned people who were able to do the jobs they were brought on to handle, maybe it all could have gone better.
Frankly, I still marvel at how invisible a Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was. This, during a war! And the FEMA and the Homeland Security and the Iraqi tipsters about the WMDs, and on and on. Any competent people brought in might have altered things. But perhaps this relates back to the man himself. If you bring in competent people, it'll make you look incompetent by comparison. Maybe, he was just protecting his fragile ego by giving a pat on the head to his old drinking buddies.
He gave his farewell address the other day. I watched it. And nope, he couldn't get through that without flubbing his lines, either. I almost felt sorry for him, but then I thought about the country as a whole.
In pop culture, Will Ferrell is doing a Broadway show titled
You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush which will open tomorrow. I almost wish he debuted the piece right after the election and was ending the run tomorrow, that way we're not stuck with this until March.
Also, CNN did a small photo album of 15 defining moments in the GWB presidency. One of the pictures was the one above, but others included the 2001 inaugural, sitting in a classroom being told the United States was under attack, Standing on "The Pile" of what was the World Trade Center, holding a bullhorn, Rumsfeld's resignation, staring out of a window of Air Force One, looking down on what was left of New Orleans after Katrina, and the final image, ducking a shoe.
To be kind, the best, brightest moment that George W. Bush had wasn't any of these. And it didn't occur in Washington DC, or New Orleans, or Miami, or Iraq. It happened right in New York City at a place they used to play baseball called Yankee Stadium. Mr. Bush threw out the first pitch at Game 3 of the 2001 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He marched onto the field, got right on the mound and threw a perfect strike to Jorge Posada. It was a glorious moment and the crowd went wild. That was the zenith, the apex, the pinnacle of the George W. Bush presidency. That one moment. America had been attacked. We were still assessing the damage. GWB walks out there and delivered a fantastic moment. And really, that's what a president can do best. Inspire, focus, calm, demonstrate. Besides that moment, and his speech on "The Pile," I can't think of any other times when he was able to connect with people in that way at all during these eight years.
It is a little pathetic that, at least for me, tossing the first pitch at a baseball game is going to be my fondest memory of him (and perhaps worse, it's not going to be my most vivid or enduring memory of him). For our country, I sincerely wish he had more moments like that night at Yankee Stadium. But he just didn't have it in him. That wasn't who this guy was.
Part of it was in not really knowing what you can do with the presidency. And that's always a crucial thing. Because it's always a lot easier to do something if you know what to do. You would have thought that GWB would have had a slightly better handle on all of this, since he had a father who did the job! A father who also warned America about getting involved in Iraq. I think this likely reflects on the Bush family dynamic.
But another part of the presidency is in making full use of those opportunities and making things happen, and that's where most of the country has languished all this while. GWB wasn't a "make things happen" kinda guy. He was more of a "let things happen" kinda guy, with a couple of notable exceptions, like in the Middle East. When someone had an agenda for him, he would run with that. But that hardly ever happened.
I think you'll start noticing the difference right away.
So there it is. We laughed. We cried. We watched in disbelief. We shook our heads and watched in further disbelief. We slapped our foreheads with our palms in more disbelief and then held our heads. But that's ending now.
Oh, and goodbye GWB. You pull the door to open it, on your way out.