Your old hometown newspaper printed this op-ed this a.m.
Georgie has George's number:
Georgie Anne Geyer: The boy from Midland never really left Texas
05:23 PM CST on Tuesday, November 4, 2008
In the last days of the presidential race, amidst all the crowds and hip-hip-hurrahs, he was strangely the "man who wasn't there." One could peek about the corners of the White House – yet even there, his increasingly wispy figure was only rarely caught in view.
I speak, of course, of our president, George W. Bush. And thinking of him, I realize, after all these awful eight years, how unknown "The Decider" still seems. When I interviewed him at length in 1999, he was the governor of Texas. "W." was then an outgoing, charming man who laughed a lot and made jokes. He spoke only about "compassionate conservatism," about small cottage industries and about reforming education.
He seemed to know who he was then, and he held an elected position that had prestige and precious little work. Yet, as he moved onto the larger and too-demanding national stage, it became clear that he really never had the faintest idea who he was. And so this naive and immaturely ambitious man could move easily, not only to poison his country's policies, but to destroy his father's distinguished legacy, disgrace the Bush family name and render impossible his brother Jeb's legitimate aspirations.
It is not accidental, but surely helpful that Oliver Stone's new film, W., has come out just as this era closes. This profile of the president, played wonderfully by Josh Brolin, is superb. The controversial Hollywood director sees George W., not as some highly motivated warmonger or even as an autocrat with some renascent conservative conviction, but rather as a kind of eternal teenager, prone to violence when his every wish is not fulfilled, enraged at his respected father for lack of attention, and willing to do anything to fill his father's seat in the Oval Office.
Some will think the Oedipal storylines that run through the film are overdone. I am not one of them. As someone who covered and admired Father Bush for many years, all of the story lines here ring true.
At one point in the film, when W. has started two wars, put us into unfathomable debt and ruined the economy, W. dreams of finding his father – "Poppy," he calls him – in HIS Oval Office, sitting in HIS chair! Poppy tells him: "You've wrecked it for us. Two hundred years of work for the Bushes – for Jeb ..."
All the characters around the president are there in the film – Cheney, Rummy, Condoleezza – in that strange "court" of ambitious people he created in place of a mature administration. Colin Powell is the Greek chorus, trying to warn, warn, warn the alternately happy-hour cocky and often darkly disgruntled W.
Indeed, in the talk leading up to the Iraq invasion, Gen. Powell's voice comes through. "Why, Iraq? Why, Iraq now?" he asks at one point. "We're way out of the box on this."
But it is weapons inspector David Kay who makes the most damning statement after finding Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. As he reports to the team in the White House, he says somberly, "Our system – the integrity of it – has broken down entirely."
And that's about as profound a way to put it as possible: The integrity of the system – the system of our country, of our government, of our polity – had broken down!
This fall, George W. Bush made a trip to one of his boyhood homes in Midland, Texas, and he repeated nostalgically what he said when he first headed to the White House: "'You know, I'm not going to change as a person because of politics or Washington' – that's what I said when I left." And he hasn't; and that may be the greatest tragedy of all.
Georgie Anne Geyer is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate. |
