George W. Bush’s new memoir, Decision Points, hits bookstores today. I don’t think I can stomach reading it — or as David Letterman recently joked, I certainly won’t read it until Bush does — but that hasn’t stopped me from perusing a few reviews, most of which reveal the same thing: that Bush was “shocked” and/or “blindsided” to learn the truth behind many of the controversies that emerged during his tenure as president.
Given Bush’s clear lack of active brain matter, I suppose we shouldn’t be shocked that he was shocked. Nor should we be surprised when, in a recent interview with Matt Lauer, Bush’s answer to any remotely probing or intellectually nuanced question was, “Read the book. That’s why I wrote it.” —-
Yet most damning of all is Bush’s assertion that the diss Kayne West threw his way in the aftermath of Katrina — that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” — was the lowest point of his presidency.
Really? Lower than leading us into a war in which thousands of U.S. men and women died based on faulty, trumped-up evidence?
Really? Lower than the Wall Street meltdown, which was in part due to your economic team’s complete lack of regulation or oversight — a disaster that has resulted in trillions of dollars in losses, caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and yielded an economic recession that continues to wreck havoc across the world more than two years later?
Really? Worse than…
I could go on, but I doubt you want me to.
Tangentially, I noticed in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review an essay by occasional CityBeat contributor Craig Fehrman in which he uses Bush’s new book to look at the controversy that surrounded the publication of Richard Nixon’s memoirs in the late 1970s.
One thought went through my mind as I finished Fehrman’s entertaining, well-researched piece: Like Nixon’s, will Bush’s reputation be at least partially restored the farther we get away from his sins?
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2010.