Bush is no longer 'The Decider' -- We are

The Washington Post's TV critic, Tom Shales, tenderly pegged Chris Matthews' "The Decider" as "a diligent, worthwhile investigation into what went wrong -- and why so often."

Princeton's Sean Wilentz, one of yesterday's commentators on the MSNBC special, ventured this abbreviated guess as to those whats and whys: "I don't think we've had as stubborn a president" in our history, which probably accounts for, as Shales put it, the "awesome 98 percent" of American historians who recently "pronounced Bush's presidency 'a failure.'"

My guess: The other two percent were holding out for "catastrophe," because "failure" is much too kind, much too restrained, much too euphemistic. Gerald Ford was a failure. Warren Harding was a failure. George W. Bush has been a bloody disaster.

And to Wilentz's gently professorial characterization of Bush as "stubborn," one can fairly and easily and with profound justification add ineffably arrogant, wretchedly ignorant and incomprehensibly reckless.

I use "incomprehensible" because we're still in something of a shock. No one yet really understands just how it was possible; how one man (putting aside Dick Cheney's "whispering" into his ear, as commentator Bob Woodward observed) could wreak so much mindless devastation in full public view.

In Matthews' historical survey, the catastrophic failures of Bush's presidency will be recorded in two words: Iraq and Katrina. Toward the end of the one-hour overview, Woodward expanded that assessment by saying the "financial crisis may be the event that defines [Bush's] presidency as much as the Iraq war."

To my way of thinking, however, Katrina -- as in its aftermath, of course, not its eventful naturalness -- and our present economic collapse were but outgrowths of Bush's epochal incompetence. And incompetence, being incompetent, can't really help its bumbling bad self. So I tend to give Bush a perhaps too generous pass on those items, but merely as one would for any of the developmentally disabled among us. (Plus, as for the economy, Bush had some impressive help -- from Reagan to Clinton to Congress, both Democratic and Republican.)

So what does that leave us? Iraq. It more or less comes down to that, and that alone: Iraq.

That war will uniquely define this presidency since it was so entirely Bush's creation. He didn't just mishandle a global crisis forced upon him -- he invented the crisis, whole cloth; and it has since, as Matthews observed, cost more than 4,000 American lives, wounded 30,000, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and drained our treasury to the fiscal tune of $10 billion a month.

Accordingly it was Iraq - what led to it and what has since transpired -- on which "The Decider" focused, ranging from Richard Clarke's thundering puzzlement over an Iraq invasion as a linked response to 9/11 to the uneasy and still doubtful outcome of our endless "surge."

Yet are we not still left with my self-posed question as to just how George W. Bush could have wrought so much mindless devastation in full public view? Consensus opinion, invariably known as conventional wisdom, has written most of it down as unmitigated bamboozlement -- Bush & Co. lied, finagled, deceived and propagandized with unparalleled ingenuity.

In short, America was hoodwinked, led astray, untethered from its virtuous personality by the devilish George Bush. Oh the shame of it all, for sure, but in time our innate goodness retriumphed.

And that, it seems to me, is pure bunk, although the mass media prefer not to tell its subscribers that they're mostly a collection of willing boobs and whining self-excuse masters.

Permit me to put it this way, or, rather, in the way of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, his majestically brilliant allegory of Germany's mid-century descent into hell:

Damn, damn those corrupters who taught their lessons in evil to an originally honest, law-abiding, but all too docile people, a people all too happy to live by a theory! How good that curse feels, how good it would feel if it arose freely and unqualifiedly from the heart! A patriotism, however, that would boldly proclaim that the bloody state whose gaping agonies we are now experiencing [Mann wrote much of Faustus in exile during the war] … -- a patriotism that would proclaim that such a state was forced upon us as something without roots in our nature as a people … would … be more high-minded than conscientious. Was not this regime, both in word and deed, merely the distorted, vulgarized, debased realization of a mindset and worldview to which one must attribute a characteristic authenticity…? I ask -- and am I asking too much?

Mann can be a difficult read, but his blistering poignancy -- his condemnation of and embarrassment over his own cultural ethnicity -- is well worth the struggle.

Am I making a cultural comparison? Obviously I am, though certainly, absolutely not to the extent of Bush qua Hitler and Americans qua Nazis. Still, there exists an eerie similarity to a noteworthy degree, otherwise I wouldn't have quoted Mann.

And it further seems to me that we stand at the abyss -- now more than ever. All of the preceding was merely to re-emphasize my point in yesterday's column: that if the Bush presidency is not held accountable in some way -- at the very pathetically least, a Congressional resolution of censure -- then we will all go down as co-conspirators after the fact as well, and "it is we who will have summoned our own demise," because we will have whistled through an unforgivable horror which, unanswered, only invites another.