When Floyd R. Turbo Bush was appointed by the Supreme Court to be President, the tv punditocracy crowed that, finally, the grownups were back at the White House after what they saw as the youthful excesses and lack of respect for the office by former President Bill Clinton and his staff. Indeed, "Quisling Chris" Matthews used those very words to describe the incoming administration.
Another NBC newscarney, Tim Russert, went to a White House party flashing a "Bush for President" pin he had under one of his lapels to Republican bigwigs. The rumor on the hill was that Matthews was angling for the press secretary's job and one has no doubt that so was Russert.
And that is before you get to the pro-government Faux Nooz, which was a virtual informercial outlet for Boy George specifically and the GOP in general.
Well, we are about to wrap up 2006 and it is apparent that I was right about Turbo when I remarked back in 2001 that there was something awfully childish about him. That culminated Thursday in the Iraq Study Group report that was not only a repudiation of Bush's handling of the war, but it tacitly undercut all the talking heads who had basically flacked for what will go down as by far the lowest collection of creeps, knaves and boobs to ever be handed the reigns of power to the greatest country in world history.
Ultimately, what is at the heart of this is Turbo boy, the neo-Romanov retard. What all the professional political blabbers and conservative camp followers backed wasn't an adult man, but an arrested adolescent, and with catastrophic consequences at that.
During his presidential campaign, H. Ross Perot spoke of "the crazy aunt in the basement," which was the ballooning budget deficit that was threatening American economic stability and yet nobody was seriously attempting to get a handle on it.
The Bush family's equivalent to that was Turbo. He apparently had some learning difficulties as a child and they weren't helped that much by his boorish, drunken battleaxe of a mother. So he was never much of a student and not particularly athletic, either, a contrast to his father, who played first base at Yale after serving in WWII, and his brother, Jeb, who was considered to be the most intellectually gifted of the Scanner and Battleaxe offspring (which resultd in Binghampton Press and Sun Bulletin writer David Rossie to remark, "being the brightest Bush boy is a little like being the most talented oboe player in Logan, Ohio.") and who got involved in banking after he took a degree in Latin American Studies. Jeb also registered for the draft, but wasn't called up.
By contrast, Turbo, an indifferent student, could only be a cheerleader and had to depend on daddy not only for his slot at Yale, but to save his ass from going to Vietnam by arranging a phony baloney position in the Texas Air National Guard during years which were mostly fuled by large amounts of alcohol and cocaine. When he attempted to get involved in the oil business his father's business buddies, which included members of the Saudi royal family, were there to bail him out when the ventures failed.
The same proved true in how Turbo became a millionaire, as Bush crony Tom Hicks brought him on board to help run the Texas Rangers, after which he sold his interest in the ballclub for a handsome amount.
While this perhaps improved his economic position, it was still evident that he still felt that he would forever be consigned to the kid's table at Thanksgiving dinner. A run for office that predated his involvement with the Rangers saw him get spanked.
He subsequently met his now wife, Laura, who basically became his surrogate mother, converting him to religion (kind of like how Jeb had gone from being a Protestant to a Catholic at the urging of his Mexican spouse) and getting him to, as the story would have it, forego the booze.
Nonetheless, even after making all that cash with Texas, Bush continued to surround himself with his daddy's buddies, even when he was named President of the United States. This should have set off all kinds of alarm bells for two reasons: one, these guys were all a bunch of thieves; two, it exhibited how Bush has trouble standing on his own two feet. In other words, he was now in Washington D.C. but had never truly moved away from home.
Unfortunately, when you go from running a parochial state such as Texas to a boisterous democracy of 300 million, it was soon evident that Bush was over his head. Lobbyists wrote most of the Congressional legislation for the GOP and all Bush had to do was rubber stamp it. But when it came to having to deal with the hardcore nitty gritty of issues when meeting with his advisers, he retreated into a fantasy world. The No Child Left Behind Act was the most insidious of the Bush fairy tales, federalizing the education system (not entirely a bad thing in itself as there needs to be some kind of national uniformity therein, but when you don't fund it the whole thing creates havoc) while not lending school systems the financial help they need to make it have a chance of working.
He continued to insist that he was a "uniter, not a divider," even as the GOP setup the most vicious propaganda apparatus in American history, and remained on vacation at his Crawford haberdashery (all hats, no cattle) while New Orleans was being destroyed by Republican neglect. The firestorm of criticism that engendered put Turbo back into photo op mode, as he was apparently convinced that they can salve over any resentment, something he has repeated in his trips to Iraq even as he presided, Nero-like, over the distaster that evolved into. Adivsers, not wanting to lose their cushy political perks, increasingly resorted to telling Turbo wanted to hear, a situation resembling that of the Joe Stalin administration.
And it is the folly of Iraq that will go down as Bush's biggest fiasco. Again, he called on his dad's buddies, Colin Powell and Ronald Dumbsfeld, to try to one up Scanner's successful campaign (though we lost the peace in that deal) to expel Saddam Hussien out of Kuwait.
Bush then engaged in one of the most laughable if it weren't so tragic photo ops in U.S. history when he threw that "Mission Accomplished" wingding dressed in a flightsuit, leading some of his critics to dub him, "commander codpiece."
The rationale for the second Iraq War was deeply flawed, attacking it in the name of the war on terrorists who had aided the 9/11 incidents, who were based in Afghanistan. Jon Stewart of the Daily Show later compared this to erecting a dam in Arkansas to deal with the flooding from Katrina, another sign of Turbo's childlike delusional tendencies.
It degnerated from there, as the administration, totally ignorant of Iraqi culture and history, ended up enabling sectarian warfare that escalated into full on civil war. 3,000 American and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian dead later, Scanner's friend James Baker, headed up a commission that excoriated Turbo's handling of the conflict and urged that the U.S. negotiate with two members of what Turbo had cartoonishly slammed as "the axis of evil," Iran and Syria.
Faced with his glum development, Bush once more crawled back into his fantasy world, where "we are winning the war in Iraq."
Inevitably, Bush has now set up the conditions for one of the great massacres since the Rwandan Genocide or the war in the Balkans. His dad isn't going to be able to help him out of that. That will be his legacy. All because he was coddled by Scanner and then tried to live up to what dad did.
This will also be the legacy of those who spurred Bush on, be it Rich Lowry, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Russert, Matthews, David Brooks, Bob Novak, Joe Lieberman, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, you name 'em, you know who they are. Treat them as if they were Nazi collaborators who created the atmosphere that raised this little man to the most powerful position on earth and got us a humiliating defeat that is also a defeat for civilization and progress.
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