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Grand Old Parachutes
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Tuesday 23 June 2009

George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a
speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama.
"I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before
doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo
that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that
persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to
change their mind."

Ah, yes, the eloquence we've all missed so much since January. "I don't
believe that persuasion isn't going to work" has to be tall in the running
for first-ballot induction into the Gibberish Hall of Fame, and that quip
about terrorists in therapy absolutely pegged the needle on the Irony
Meter, as ABC News pointed out. "Interestingly," reported the network, "it
was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi
jihadi rehabilitation camp - called the "Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre
for Care and Counseling. To decidedly mixed success."

Well, go figure. It wouldn't be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops
of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now,
would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our
former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no,
actually, not really.

In all likelihood, a day will come when the Republican Party will recover
from the dazzling carnival of buffoonery, insanity and self-destruction it
has become over the last three years, but that day has neither come nor
looks to anytime soon. For the time being and until further notice, mostly
because no new leader has stepped forward without sounding like an
Appalachian snake-handler far gone on the still, the GOP is the party of
George W. Bush. There's bad; there's worse; there's worst, and then
there's that.

Greg Sargent, on his Washington Post blog, pointed out some data buried in
a recent Wall Street Journal poll that must have every breathing
Republican strategist grinding their teeth in despair:

The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even
the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney. The poll found that
26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of
Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP
overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four
points from April. Okay, the difference is within the margin of error,
making this a statistical tie. But still, this is pretty awful for the
GOP, given that for a long time Cheney's historic unpopularity seemed to
define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans.

There a couple of takeaways here. First, it appears that Cheney is doing a
better job of making his own case than the current crop of GOP leaders are
doing on behalf of the party as a whole, even though he's no longer in
office. And second, it gives the lie to the notion that Cheney's ongoing
media tour is helpful to the GOP overall, as some party leaders have
publicly claimed to think. In reality, he only seems to be helping
himself.


All is not lost in GOP Land, however. Those loyal Republicans bemoaning
the current state of their party will be heartened to know that the people
who personally detonated the GOP through rank incompetence, rampant
avarice and lust for power are actually doing just fine, thank you very
much.

Dick Cheney is shopping his memoirs around to publishers and asking for
multi-millions in return, which some idiot will probably give him. Karl
Rove just got a seven-figure deal to write his own Bush-era memoirs. Condi
Rice just signed a three-book deal reportedly worth $2.5 million. Michael
Mukasey, Tommy Thompson and Harriet Miers have all landed lucrative gigs
at prestigious law firms, and Ari Fleischer somehow went to work for the
Green Bay Packers.

Richard Armitage and Michael Hayden have landed on the board of directors
for a pair of large defense contractors. Only Alberto Gonzales stands out
as the lone Bush administration official unable to cash in on his time in
government; his book deal was roundly rejected by publishers, and no law
firm has seen fit to add his name to their roster. Can't imagine why.

And as for George W. Bush himself? Nothing less than $7 million for his
memoirs, apparently to be titled "Decision Points," which will contain "a
dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former
President's personal and political life." Laura Bush has also inked a book
deal for $3.5 million, meaning the former First Family will be getting
more than $10 million to tell us what it was like to annihilate the
Republican Party and grievously damage the country while eating off the
best White House china.

The Republican Party is less popular than Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney is
about as popular as the shingles, but the folks who ran the GOP's train
off the tracks and delivered the nation into this multifaceted mess are
doing quite well in the aftermath. One is left to wonder how the people
who voted for them feel about that. It's a damned safe bet they're not
doing nearly as well as their erstwhile leaders are. Some might call that
karma, but nobody should be surprised.

It's the George W. Bush Way, after all: I got mine, screw everyone else,
amen.

http://www.truthout.org/062309A