I missed it in last week’s New York Times Magazine, but you know it’s trouble when a senior editor at the Weekly Standard says the following about the President. Christopher Caldwell was trying to explain why so few Republicans seem concerned about losing power.
Maybe President Bush has been a president of such trailblazing, standard-setting, nonpareil awfulness that it does not matter who or what follows him. But even if you suspect that history will judge Bush harshly, that alone would not lead people to rejoice in the triumph of his adversaries. Defenders of the just-disgraced Nixon in 1974 and the joyfully cashiered Jimmy Carter in 1980 were full of dire warnings. Why have few such people risen to the defense of George Bush?
Here is a guess. The recent election feels like something more intimate than a personnel change. It feels like the beginnings of an escape from a twisted relationship.
Jesus. If that is how Weekly Standard Republicans are feeling, things must be pretty dire. Check out this conclusion.
Bush has governed as he promised to — with the kind of phony-demotic cocksureness that many people like in pickup-truck commercials and think of themselves as embodying. When he let it be known that he didn’t “do nuance,” it was an invitation to say: “Good. Neither do we.” But this banty self-assurance — our self-assurance — appears not such a great trait when it leads you into a bloodbath in Iraq. The feeling circulating since the election is relief — relief that this unflattering mirror is a bit closer to being taken away. It should not surprise us that this feeling is as strong among those who supported the president as among those who did not.
Ouch and double ouch. But, I gotta say…my relief lasted about 48 hours. Then I read another dispatch from Iraq. Then I saw how Bush was reacting to the Iraq Study Group. And all that relief? It was gone.
