Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Bush said no to Cheney

More evidence is mounting that George W. Bush, though he may have been surrounded by some fairly radical and dangerous people, was not the complete puppet had that many of us took him to be. I recently wrote about his dismay at Rumsfeld's inaction after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and now Time magazine has published a wrap up of how Bush refused Cheney's request to give Libby a pardon.

I especially like Scott Horton's take on the issue:
The new disclosure seems again designed to show Cheney as an extremist whose advice was not always followed by Bush.
I didn't expect to be writing twice in 2009 that George W. Bush served to partly rein in the extremist forces he unleashed (or at least to keep them in check some of the time), but the evidence certainly seems to be mounting that he was not the blind, power-hungry, fundamentalist dope I took him to be.
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3 comments:

  1. bonnjillJuly 28, 2009 at 3:51 AM

    Maybe, but you have to remember that he appointed the extremists around him. He likely could have booted them at any time.

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  2. CraigJuly 28, 2009 at 9:46 AM

    Quite right - I am jot trying to exonerate Bush completely, but I am changing my own take on who he was as president. He was not a complete puppet who did what the real leaders told him to do. He knew he was president.

    But yes, he helped put together the frat-boy, cover-me-ass-I'm-going-in-there system that ran the US into the ground for eight years. As Time put it, "Cheney also believes that Bush cannot claim that as a legacy if he fails to protect the aides and officials who carried out the dirty work."

    We are governed partly by frat boys answerable only to each other, not to us. But Bush may not have been one.

    ReplyDelete
  3. CraigJuly 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM

    jot = not (why can't we edit comments?)

    ReplyDelete

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