People that know me know that I frequently joke about Bush’s prospects in retirement. Who is going to pay to hear him give a speech? George W. Bush is like Dan Quayle on steroids. He’s not just ridiculous, he’s actually responsible. He’s going to go down in history as a kind of hybrid of Nixon/McGovern/Carter. He’ll be part radical, part incompetent, part crooked, and totally responsible for ruining the short-term prospects for his party. No one is going to want to hear Bush speak. First of all, he can’t speak. But Bush is counting on a lot of money coming his way on the lecture tour.
…in an interview with a book author in the Oval Office one day last December, he daydreamed about the next phase of his life, when his time will be his own.
First, Mr. Bush said, “I’ll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol’ coffers.” With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, “I don’t know what my dad gets — it’s more than 50-75” thousand dollars a speech, and “Clinton’s making a lot of money.”
Somehow I don’t think the Crawford Kiwanis Club has that kind of cheese. Bush’s real ambition is even more pie-in-the-sky.
For now, though, Mr. Bush told the author, Robert Draper, in a later session, “I’m playing for October-November.” That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: “To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said later, “stay longer.”
But fully aware of his standing in opinion polls, Mr. Bush said his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, would perhaps do a better job selling progress to the American people than he could.
“Stay longer.” That’s Bush’s real goal for America. He wants to make it possible for us to stay longer in Iraq. And this is the kind of confidence he provides…
Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”
But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.
To this day, he doesn’t know why the Iraqi army was disbanded? Hard to hold someone accountable for that decision if you don’t know who made it, and why. But Bush is just being dishonest. He’s dishonest to the end.
“One interesting question historians are going to have to answer is: Would Saddam have behaved differently if he hadn’t gotten mixed signals between the first resolution and the failure of the second resolution?” Mr. Bush said. “I can’t answer that question. I was hopeful that diplomacy would work.”
It did not, but soon enough, somebody else will make the decisions on Iraq. And then, Mr. Bush said, he would still be pursuing his “freedom agenda” at his institute, modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where young democratic leaders from around the world would study.
“Sixty-two is really young,” Mr. Bush said, “and yet I’ll be through with my presidency.”
No one is going to show up at his shitty institute. Who is this guy kidding?
Here’s the one part I enjoyed reading…
Mr. Bush went on to share private thoughts that appeared to reflect a level of sorrow and presidential isolation that he strongly implied he took pains to hide, a state of being that he seemed to view as coming with the presidency and with which he professed to be at peace.
Telling Mr. Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted” around the White House, he added in May, “I can’t let my own worries — I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them with that.”
“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”
In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”
Did Laura mean ‘run for President’ or did she mean ‘invade Iraq’? Either way, it was a mistake and a misfortune.