by hilzoy
From ThinkProgress, a passage from Robert Draper’s new book on Bush:
“Bush, for his part, was not disposed to second-guessing. Througout 2006, he read historical texts relating to Lincoln, Churchill, and Truman — three wartime leaders, the latter two of whom left office to something less than public acclaim. History would acquit him, too. Bush was confident of that, and of something else as well. Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMDs. [p. 388]”
I’m sorry: this is just delusional. But it’s hardly a one-time thing. Here, from the Sydney Morning Herald (via Atrios), is more delusion:
“Bush (…) arrived in Australia in a chipper mood.
“We’re kicking ass,” he told Mark Vaile on the tarmac after the Deputy Prime Minister inquired politely of the President’s stopover in Iraq en route to Sydney.”
“Kicking ass”?? Mwahahahaha! I wonder whether Bush would count the invasion of Iraq as a failure if the gates of hell opened up and swallowed our entire army, while a hail of fire descended from heaven on the White House, and the seas turned to blood, and pestilence and plague and frogs and boils swept through the land, and God Himself appeared in the firmaments surrounded by the Heavenly Host, and said: George W. Bush, invading Iraq was the wrong call.
Somehow, I suspect he’d just say: well, God, I think I’ll be vindicated by history. After all, think of Truman.
From the sublime to the ridiculous: Vanity Fair, via FDL, reports that Judith Giuliani gets an entire extra plne seat for her handbag:
“She has become used to getting her way. An organizer of a recent fashion shoot received a call from one of Rudy’s business associates warning her to address his wife as Judith. According to this source, Judith became so smitten with the dress she was modeling “that she simply didn’t want to take it off. She didn’t offer to pay. She made it very clear she wanted it for free. You know how it is when someone stalls.” Instead, says this source, Judith kept repeating a kind of mantra: “I’m a sample size, I’m a sample size.”
The fashion insider sighs. “But the problem was the dress was a sample, and the designer’s only sample. But she was very persistent. We had almost a metaphorical tugging of the dress away!” And not just that dress. “There were a number of items she tried on she wanted. There was greed in the air. We finally brokered a deal with the designer to give her some sort of discount for the dress.”
Around the office of Giuliani Partners, it is said, Sunny Mindel, Giuliani’s communications director, spoke of the need for providing an entire plane seat for Judith’s “Baby Louis”—a reference to her Louis Vuitton handbag, which sits in solitary splendor on her travels.”
Which leads to this post, from Daniel Drezner, which I quote in its entirety:
“Take this for what you will:
Over the past month, I’ve had at least two dozen conversations with various people about Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. A lot of these people are Democrats, but there were a healthy number of Republicans and independents as well. These are all smart observers of politics who generally do not make knee-jerk assessments. The one common denominator was that, at some point, all of these people had lived in the New York City area while Rudy was mayor.
What is astonishing is that, despite the fact that this collection of individuals would likely disagree about pretty much everything, there was an airtight conensus about one and only one point:
A Giuliani presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States.
That is all.”
Word.
Of course we’re kicking ass. How could we not kick ass when we’re armed with tanks, fighter jets, helicopters, bombers, etc. and the insurgents have none of these things?
What he doesn’t seem to realize is that it doesn’t fncking matter. That not only are we kicking insurgent ass but we’re kicking the hell out of the civilians’ asses too. That blowing a bunch of sh!t up is actually counter productive. That the fact that military counts every dead male of fighting age as an “insurgent” or “terrorist” doesn’t make it true.
Really, we have a delusional, sociopathic frat boy for a President.
Being delusional as to the status of the war seems to not merely be no impediment for Presidential candidates, but actually required. See this summary of last night’s debate:
“Arizona Sen. John McCain, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Giuliani were among those who stressed their support for the war, at times even competing to show their commitment.
“The surge is apparently working,” said Romney, referring to the increase in troops.
That brought an instant rebuke from McCain, who said: “The surge is working, sir; no, not ‘apparently.’ It’s working.””
As long as they let Ron Paul into the auditorium during the debates, the audience will have a chance to see how delusional or dishonest the rest of those candidates are.
The supposed Republican Eleventh Commandment is coming back to bite them big time. If the Republicans were actually speaking badly of the president when he needs to be spoken badly of, there’s a good chance that they wouldn’t get whipped next year.
What was it that triggered this attempt to transform Bush from an anti-intellectual fratboy who was proud that he never read anything into someone who supposedly reads Camus for fun and discusses his policies in terms of Graham Greene novels (which he apparently misunderstands, but never mind)? It’s a pretty recent development. Can anyone point to the first sign of it?
KCinDC–I believe this is the sign you’re looking for
What was it that triggered this attempt to transform Bush from an anti-intellectual fratboy who was proud that he never read anything into someone who supposedly reads Camus for fun and discusses his policies in terms of Graham Greene novels (which he apparently misunderstands, but never mind)?
IIRC, there’s a new book out about Bush that says it was the seriousness of the job that flipped him. he and Rove have a little rivalry about who can read more books. Rove always wins.
at least this is what i heard on NPR yesterday.
“plne seat”
I’d like an “a.”
I think the book you mention is the same one where Bush is quoted as saying his plan was to keep the Iraqi army intact, but “it didn’t work out”–and that when the interviewer pointed out it was our administrators over there that did, Bush said he had no memory of what he said when they told him (but guessed it was something like ‘that’s not the plan.’)
By the by, I’ve always thought the debate over Baathification shows what a bad idea the invasion was: It’s just as possible that if the army had stayed intact, we’d have wound up with what we have now, a corrupt partisan force that deals ruthlessly with political enemies. There was never a guarantee either way would work.
Depressingly, my Republican sister-in-law is leaning Giuliani, on the theory that he can beat Hillary.
I have my doubts — he’s polarizing enough that he might be the one Repub who *can’t* beat Hillary — but am more worried that she has gotten such a favorable impression of Giuliani. If the media doesn’t get out the message from him, we may trade an incompetent president for a sociopathic one.
Oh, the one we have is plenty sociopathic, Anderson, just maybe not as dangerous as Giuliani.
The President was referring to Reid and Pelosi.
Anderson,
One good thing about this from my point of view is that there are now Republicans who are triangulating — evidence that they have lost confidence in themselves. Now if only the Democrats would have a little self-confidence….
I don’t see what the big deal is about the Louis Vuitton handbag. How do you expect me to carry Rudy’s testicles?
The more Louis Vuitton handbags in seats on airplanes, the more leg room for Me. And I’d prefer the flight crews and security people address me as ME, thank you very much, and while you’re at it, could you remove these other …. creatures … from the plane as well to make room for the voices in my head and my sock puppets, whom you may also address as Me.
Whoa .. not so fast .. Evian water for all of Me, and while your up, I could use a capital gains tax cut.
I mean, it’s not like it’s a Mohammed Vuitton bag. Or a Donna Hanover bag, which she is, but back to … ME …….
Fueling that delusion is the willingness of the Pentagon to engage in creative body counts a la Viet Nam.
The numbers bandied about by the Pentagon to support the surge are probably cooked to favor the administration’s political goals — WaPo on the Pentagon’s bizarre methods for counting “sectarian violence.”
“If a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian,” the official said. “If it went through the front, it’s criminal.”
* * *
“Given a lack of capability to accurately track Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence, except in certain instances,” the spokesman said, “we do not track this data to any significant degree.”
* * *
Attacks by U.S.-allied Sunni tribesmen — recruited to battle Iraqis allied with al-Qaeda — are also excluded from the U.S. military’s calculation of violence levels.
It makes Charles’ pretty bar graphs “clarifying” the situation worthless propaganda since the raw data is being massaged for this purpose. We are being actively lied to by the Bush administration as to the key criteria justifying the surge — the alleged improvement in the security situation as measured by civilian deaths.
Plus they keep the raw data secret:
The military stopped releasing statistics on civilian deaths in late 2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context. In an e-mailed response to questions last weekend, an MNF-I spokesman said that while trends were favorable, “exact monthly figures cannot be provided” for attacks against civilians or other categories of violence in 2006 or 2007, either in Baghdad or for the country overall.
Of course they can be “provided” — they just refuse to release the raw data.
Delusional policy protected from scrutiny by deceit.
OT, but maybe it’ll make DaveC happier: This is not making it easier for me to adjust to the prospect of HRC as the nominee. I remember being creeped out by the original Harper’s article about the Fellowship.