Hilariously brutal review of W's "Decision Points" (The Independent)

[jefferson_dem]

Matthew Norman: How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House?

It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied George Bush. He has the self-awareness of a bison

Wednesday, 10 November 2010

May the Lord the former president so ostentatiously worships have mercy on my soul, and those in Iraq without water, electricity and medicine forgive me, but I just cannot suppress a twinge of sympathy for George W Bush.

The source of this pity pang isn't the usual one with those struggling bemusedly with the loss of power (Mrs Thatcher literally unable, for example, to dial a phone number). So far as the practicalities, Mr Bush has adapted well. Apparently he concludes his memoir Decision Points with the familiar anecdote of how, within days of leaving Washington, he was picking up his dog's mess with a plastic bag in a Texas park. Evidently he regards this as a cute vignette of the transience of power, as well as his own endearing lack of pomp. Yet what causes the stab of pity is the stupidity at which it hints.

How could anyone in possession of a three-figure IQ (still a moot point with Bush) fail to see what a golden gift that image is to satirists? There he is, in the cartoon in my head, scooping up a couple of Cumberland sausages while following him, shovelling up the Augean Stable-sized steaming pile he left behind in the Oval Office, is Barack Obama at the wheel of an industrial digger.

This blindness to visual imagery is quite a motif, judging by Times extracts and an interview with its editor. Apart from being attacked for indifference to black people by Kanye West, the rapper Obama dismissed as a jackass, all his greatest regrets are pictorial public relations disasters.

His sadness over Hurricane Katrina is not for the victims in New Orleans, as Mr West understood, but for the damage done to his reputation by that snap of him staring blankly and aloofly down on the catastrophe from the window of Air Force One. His paramount distress over Iraq is not over the loss of life, civilian and military, but how that banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" on the aircraft carrier came to make him look naive and vainglorious. He reveals his shallowness and vapidity with these reflections in the most crystalline of clarity, and hasn't a notion he is doing so.

It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him.

<SNIP>

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/matthew-norman/matthew-norman-how-did-this-wastrel-ever-find-his-way-to-the-white-house-2129608.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. Gross exaggeration

Three figure IQ ? IQ of a daisy more like it.

[Lord Magus]

21. He's saying that three-figure IQ inherent excludes Bush.

But then, so does two-figure IQ.

[SpiralHawk]

2. "Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)

"I'll be smirking all the way to the bank. After all, the rest of the Republicon chickenhawks thinks I is a total hero and stuff as well as an economical genius and a moral giant. Bwaaa ha ha ha ha. Smirk."

- xCommander AWOL (R)

[Divernan]

3. Wastrel drunken son of elite East Coast family finds way to PA Ave.

playing the genial good ol' boy from the South, and why in heavens name did he want it anyway?

"Almost every sentence in the Times extraction (and it does feel like having a tooth pulled) invokes a fatigued he-just-doesn't-get-it. Churchill is inevitably adduced, while W bangs on about his passion for reading history. Inevitably, he fails to make the connection.

"Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft," urged Winston, and while Bush did little as president other than read history books, the stagecraft entirely eluded him. Some of those tomes must have dealt with the British and Soviet experiences of invading Afghanistan, and not a word sunk in. I know how that feels from a tussle with A Brief History of Time. The difference is that I didn't extrapolate my failure to grasp a syllable into a bold attempt to rewrite the laws of quantum physics. He assumed he could rewrite the laws of geopolitics.

The process of historical revisionism has, like everything else, speeded alarmingly in the internet age. The emergence of Sarah Palin as an imaginable presidential candidate, allied to the unending travails of Obama, have induced in the amnesiac, the obtuse and the plain bananas a fondness for the memory of George W Bush. It will not spread. If this great reader of history is concerned for his place in it – and that, needless to say, is why he hired a bright young groupie from Yale to write this memoir in something approximating English – he needn't fret. In those few lists ranking all the presidents compiled since he left office, W is invariably in the bottom five.

For the two imbecile wars he began, for condoning torture by denying waterboarding was torture at all on the grounds that his lawyers said it was legal; for turning the surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton
into the crippling deficit that is bringing the age of American hegemony to a startlingly abrupt end; and for being the pitiably Wagnerian fool who stumbled on to the grandest stage without any apparent clue why or for what earthly purpose, there he will forever remain."

[Warren Stupidity]

4. "miss me yet"?

Fuck no.

[bread_and_roses]

5. A gratuitous insult to bison

there is no living creature - not even an amoeba or a fungi or the blind insects that live in caves to which i would compare any member of the BFEE. For comparison - if any is possible - one has to reach into the realm of myth and monster. And even there one is hard put to find an analogue.

[SidDithers]

6. K&R...nt

Sid

[lunatica]

7. This article is too kind to the village idiot

[ProSense]

8. What a disturbing image

Save the trees!

[southernyankeebelle]

9. This man should be in jail. He isn't bothered by the innocent people he killed. Just

think if it were your family? How would you feel? He is no better then any thugs in the middle east.

[The Backlash Cometh]

10. Does anybody have the picture of him staring down at Katrina?

This is my favorite line:

How could anyone in possession of a three-figure IQ (still a moot point with Bush) fail to see what a golden gift that image is to satirists? There he is, in the cartoon in my head, scooping up a couple of Cumberland sausages while following him, shovelling up the Augean Stable-sized steaming pile he left behind in the Oval Office, is Barack Obama at the wheel of an industrial digger.

Some cartoonist should really draw that picture.

[XemaSab]

12. I think this is the picture:

[The Backlash Cometh]

13. This picture is a mistake only because his response was so inept?

Is that the reason why he refers to it?

[XemaSab]

14. That's my guess

n/t

[political_Dem]

11. If other people can see W. as an idiot, why not America?

As droll and scathing as the review of W.'s "book", it is chilling to note that this man was two inches away from the red button.

Even in self-reflexive examination, I doubt that W. will ever realize what a colossal mess he put America and the rest of the world in. I also doubt that the Bush family will realize that with each poisoned branch of the rotting family tree, there was not one family member that has done anything to help others or to make this world a better place. Instead, W. and the rest of his family has caused nothing but heartache, bloodshed and misery.

In the end, Kanye West pegged the former POTUS right when calling him out about his lack of empathy. The rapper's prescient words could be extended as a metaphor about Bush's entire demeanor: one lacking empathy and remorse. It is shocking to no one that it didn't occur to him to feel the least bit sorry for the lives lost in Hurricane Katrina, let alone the other "collateral damage" his disaster-causing policies have cost his country and the rest of the world. :(

[Lord Magus]

20. Kanye West should've just said "George Bush doesn't care about people."

[Blue_Tires]

15. wonderful stuff

[Scurrilous]

16. K & R

:thumbsup:

[Ter]

17. For some reason, I misread to title to have said "Hillary's"

:)

[laugle]

18. He's a complete and absolute sociopath! nt

[Lord Magus]

19. The insult to bison was entirely uncalled for.

They're noble creatures who don't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with Shrub. An amoeba would be a more apt comparison. They have a similar number of brain cells, after all.