This came to me today with two separate revelations. First, someone as notable as the popularly elected non-President of 2000, Al Gore, finally stopped beating about the bush (so to speak) and called Dear Leader out on 9/11. Second, Pakistan, our faithful ally in the wah on terra, just said "Suck it up: Afghanistan is lost." Add this up with the "known knowns" of the leaping, screaming failures in Iraq and the aftermath of Katrina and we have something really, really special: Objective, conclusive evidence of the worst president who ever lived.
More to come ...
Up until now, no U.S. president has lost a war. Even Vietnam was lost by a succession of presidents, from Truman who sent the first advisers to Ford who presided while the helicopters lifted off the Saigon embassy roof. Sure, we could say the Korean War ended in stalemate, but that’s still not a loss. Even the War of 1812 was, at worst, "inconclusive." In fact, Jefferson Davis was the only "president" on U.S. soil to get his ass whupped. Come to think of it, Jeff Davis and George W. Bush’s "presidencies" share the traits of fundamental illegitimacy, waging wars of choice and substantial support among Southerners. Curious, no?
But I digress from the main point: George W. Bush has evidently lost two wars.
Lost War I
Nothing more can be said about Iraq except that it is just getting worse, amazingly worse. Stunning violence, even by Iraqi standards, including six Sunnis burned alive. Imminent withdrawal from the uncontrollable Anbar Province. The House of Saud spanking Dickhead Cheney. Bush’s abortive attempt at a summit with Maliki. Colin Powell and the MSM finally using the oxymoron "civil war" instead of euphemisms. Events overtaking the "vaunted" Iraq Study Group. The pithiest assessment yet comes from Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek:
What we will soon need is a supreme act of realism, dictated not by the ascendancy of a school of thought in Washington but by events on the ground in Iraq. We will need a Kissingerian effort to extricate the United States from the catastrophe that Iraq has become.
Not "catastrophic success" but just plain old "catastrophe."
Lost War II
This is a stunner, though we can’t exactly consider the source impeccable. The headline says it all: Accept defeat by Taliban, Pakistan tells Nato (forgive therawstory link, the source is the Telegraph but I can’t find a direct route). Right now, it’s barely a whisper, if that, in the U.S. media but at this point, why doubt the veracity of statements like this:
Pakistan's foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, has said in private briefings to foreign ministers of some Nato member states that the Taliban are winning the war in Afghanistan and Nato is bound to fail.
He has advised against sending more troops. Western ministers have been stunned. "Kasuri is basically asking Nato to surrender and to negotiate with the Taliban," said one Western official who met the minister recently.
Resistance is useless! Resistance is useless! Resistance ... well, you get the idea.
Katrina floods, Democratic wave
No need to write more on Katrina. Let’s just add what a source affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government. In The Real Message of the Midterm Elections Russell Linden writes:
After the horrors of Hurricane Katrina (which revealed incompetence at all levels of government), it’s not in vogue today to argue that government doesn’t matter, or that "the answer" is to radically reduce the size of government, or to contract everything out.
No light touch for Ray Nagin or Kathleen Blanco, but Harvard has just politely sanctioned the calling of its illustrious (notorious?) MBA alum and President of the United States "incompetent."
Gore calls a duck a duck
This frustrated outburst by The Rightful President Gore was painful on many levels but refreshing for its frankness:
How about all the warnings? (on terror attacks)
That’s a separate question. And it’s almost too easy to say, "I would have heeded the warnings." In fact, I think I would have, I know I would have. We had several instances when the CIA’s alarm bells went off, and what we did when that happened was, we had emergency meetings and called everybody together and made sure that all systems were go and every agency was hitting on all cylinders, and we made them bring more information, and go into the second and third and fourth level of detail. And made suggestions on how we could respond in a more coordinated, more effective way. It is inconceivable to me that Bush would read a warning as stark and as clear [voice angry now] as the one he received on August 6th of 2001, and, according to some of the new histories, he turned to the briefer and said, "Well, you’ve covered your ass." And never called a follow up meeting. Never made an inquiry. Never asked a single question. To this day, I don’t understand it. And, I think it’s fair to say that he personally does in fact bear a measure of blame for not doing his job at a time when we really needed him to do his job.
Read the whole diary if you missed it. It’s excellent and was on the rec list for quite a while.
But the bottom line is this:
We have a man in office claiming to be the President of the United States. He has lost a war of choice. He is losing a war that the world saw as just. He lost a major American city. He lost a big chunk of Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. Worst of all, these failures have cost hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.
It’s not about policy arguments. It’s not about priority differences. This man is not just utterly, foolishly, dangerously incompetent, he is a four-time loser. Anyone who supports him is clearly delusional (apologies to those whose loved ones suffer from mental and emotional disorders; sympathy to the families afflicted by wingnuttery).
The legacy of George W. Bush is sealed: America Hates Losers and few in history have lost this big.