Let's Stop Pretending Bush Knows What He's Doing

The most failed president in our nation's history wants credit for the war on terror. Well, if nothing else, he has the best public relations money can buy. How else to explain such an incompetent man getting so far? Under Bush, our enemies are multiplying, our friends are shaking their heads, the neocons are trying to drag our country into world war three and the president is once again on vacation. This is leadership?

Christopher Dickey of Newsweek offers his perspective:

Just five years ago this week the CIA sent a memo to President George W. Bush, vacationing then as now in Crawford, Texas, with the heading “Bin Laden determined to Strike in U.S.” But there was more, as Ron Suskind wrote at the beginning of his recent book, “The One Per Cent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11” (Simon & Schuster). Panicked CIA analysts flew to Texas to brief Bush personally in 2001, “to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.” Bush sized them up, as is his wont, looking to judge the content of what they told him by the confidence with which the message was delivered. Bush wasn’t convinced. “All right,” said the president, “You’ve covered your ass now.”

Let's stop a moment and look at President Bush telling the experts, "You've covered your ass now." Isn't that what Bush specializes in? Isn't that what Karl Rove is for? Isn't that what those hundreds of millions of dollars spent on public relations for? To cover up how incompetent these right wing Republicans are? At this late date, are there people who still trust Bush and his advisers? The polls say a small percentage of Americans still trust Bush and I don't understand it. Let's continue with Dickey's article:

There is no excuse for those who would carry out such atrocities, but there are reasons that keep pushing recruits to take up the suicidal cause of attacking the United States. To blame “Islamic fascism” that “wants to destroy those of us who love freedom” dodges responsibility for making those reasons more abundant, and making them worse, over the last five years. What’s at work in the heads of those who would kill themselves to slaughter Americans is less Al Qaeda’s ideology, such as it is, than a pervasive sense that Muslims are under attack: their lands occupied; their men, women and children victimized around the world. The Iraqi slaughterhouse, besieged Gaza, wasted Lebanon are all examples in the minds of those who convince themselves that suicidal terror is the only way to fight back. While partly blaming Israel, their frantic logic finds easier targets among the people who elected the invaders of Iraq, the backers of Israel, George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The American failure to limit these scenes of carnage in the Muslim world, or even to understand them, has combined with shortsighted military policies to create a kind of breeder reactor for explosive terrorism.

Under Bush, the world's opinion of the United States has dropped like a rock. The sympathy that the world had for us after 9/11 has completely disappeared; Bush has squandered five years on the most incompetent foreign policy in our nation's history. Oh, by the way, Bush has still failed to capture Osama bin Laden, the man who started all this. Like I said, let's stop pretending that Bush knows what he's doing.