Like father, like son
Bush's cranky, feeble defense of the Iraq war at Monday's press conference echoed his father's political meltdown. By Sidney Blumenthal
Aug. 24, 2006 | Every Bush presidency is unhappy in its own way. George W. Bush has contrived to do the opposite of his father, as if to provide evidence for a classic case of reaction formation. Rather than halt the Army before Baghdad, he occupied the whole country. Rather than pursue a Middle East peace process that dragged along a recalcitrant Israeli government, he cast the process aside.
"Frustrated?" President Bush volunteered in his Monday press conference. "Sometimes I'm frustrated." His crankiness has deeper sources than having truncated his usual monthlong summer vacation in sweltering Crawford, Texas. "Rarely surprised," he continued, extolling his world-weary omniscience. "Sometimes I'm happy," he plunged on, but thought better than to elaborate. "This is -- but war is not a time of joy. These aren't joyous times. These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country." Then he decided he would indicate he was a calming influence, so he added, "I understand that."
But Bush is trapped in a self-generated dynamic that eerily recalls the centrifugal forces that spun apart his father's presidency. George H.W. Bush, a World War II fighter pilot, was unfairly said by the media to suffer from "the wimp factor," "emasculated by the office of vice president," according to a notorious Newsweek cover story in 1987. (George W., acting as enforcer, his then favorite role, cut Newsweek's reporters off from further access.) It was not until the Gulf War that the public became convinced that the elder Bush was a strong leader and not the wimp he was stereotypically depicted as. But then almost immediately afterward came a recession. Bush's feeble response was not seen as merely an expression of typical Republican policy but as a profound character flaw. If Bush was strong, why didn't he solve the problem? The public concluded he was indifferent, and its view of him curdled into anger. Outdoing the father by subduing "the wimp factor," the son has not grasped that it was the father's presumed strength and not his weakness that undid him in the end.
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Perhaps Bush's bizarre summer reading, according to his press office, of Albert Camus' "The Stranger" is responsible for his mélange of absurdities, appeal to an existential threat, and erratic point of view, veering from aggressor to passive observer. Would a staff aide have the audacity to suggest that he read B.H. Liddell Hart's military classic, "Strategy"? "Self-exhaustion in war," wrote Liddell Hart, "has killed more States than any foreign assailant." It was a lesson in restraint the father understood when he stopped short of Baghdad.
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http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/08/24/bush/
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