The Harsh Reality Of What They've Done To America, And The World, Begins To Sink In For Ex-Bush Staffers

By Darryl Mason

The White House is under siege. President Bush has bottomed out to some of the lowest poll numbers in the history of the United States; Congress is bitter and hostile; the War On Iraq is a brutal, death-soaked tragedy; the 'War on Terror' looms ahead, unresolved and ill-defined for decades to come; the Bush domestic agenda is a wasteland of missed opportunities and busted dreams and the Bush legacy is set to go down as one of the darkest and most miserable periods of modern American history.

It's little wonder, then, that key Bush staffers are bailing on their embattled boss in a rising tide of departures, some long expected, others out of the blue, sudden and flailing.

Some have fled barely able to function, while others have decided any life outside of the White House is better than life inside the White House.

Literally dozens of key Bush staffers and advisers have quit the Bush administration in the past year. Many, like Karl Rove, have been working for George W. Bush for more than a decade. Some have never known a working life where Bush was not their chief priority.

You read through this story from the Washington Post, you take in the very obvious first signs of looming bouts of crippling depression that some ex-staffers will face, and you wonder : who will be the first ex-Busher to take their own life?

....the cumulative exodus of so many key people at once has transformed the White House as it heads into the dwindling months of the Bush presidency. Rove and Bartlett are gone, and so are their fellow Texans, Harriet E. Miers and Alberto R. Gonzales. Tony Snow, Sara M. Taylor, Rob Portman, J.D. Crouch, Peter D. Feaver, J. Scott Jennings and a host of others have left.

There is so much turnover that on one recent Friday there were four farewell parties or last-day exits. Bush poses for so many Oval Office photos with departing aides it feels like an assembly line.

The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure.

"There's this overriding awareness that we're living and acting for the judgment of history," said William Inboden, who resigned last month as senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council.

And as history judges, Iraq is always there. "It constantly looms," he said. "It is the inescapable presence, the inescapable reality. You see it in all these ways. People. Time. Money. Diplomatic and political capital. It sort of becomes the reality you live with and obviously we have to be able to."

...some have grown embittered at what has become of the presidency they helped build. A key Bush reelection strategist has disavowed him, his former U.N. ambassador has become a vocal critic of key policies, his former defense secretary says he does not miss him, his former speechwriter wrote a harsh takedown of another top aide.

One former senior official said nearly everyone who has left the administration is angry in some way or another -- at the president for making bad decisions, at his staff for misguiding him, at events that have spiraled out of control.

Karl Rove doesn't sound much like the cocky, boastful and arrogant figure who once bobbed at Bush's side like the Abbott to the the president's Costello.

"I understand there are people out there who really don't like me. And the question is, am I going to let it bother me? I ignore the ugly things that are said." Still, the notoriety comes with an edge. "I'm more conscious of my surroundings when I'm in public places."

"I told the boss, 'I feel like I'm deserting you in a time of war,' " he said. "...I don't feel sorry for myself."

This was a recurring theme in the course of an hour-long conversation. He is not depressed, he said more than once. "Hey, man, that was my life," he said. "It's not my life now. One of the reasons I don't think I'm depressed is I'm always looking forward."

Rove is not one for dwelling on decisions made or sharing blame for what went wrong. He has harsh words for Democrats who, he said, never accepted Bush as president. But he said he understands the price of the war. "It weighs on you a lot, and if you're not aware of it at the time, you're insane," he said. "People die. People from the same small town in Nevada where I grew up. . . . Is there second-guessing in terms of people hand-wringing? 'Oh my God, if we'd only done it this way'? No. But is there discussion of did this work out the way we expected and if not, why? Yes."

Dan Bartlett speaks in similar terms. As Bush's counselor, Bartlett and Rove often quarreled in the White House. By the end, colleagues said, they barely spoke except in formal meetings. Rove usually favored an in-your-face political strategy, while Bartlett advocated a less aggressive approach. And friends said Bartlett felt that Rove still saw him as the young kid who came to work for him 15 years ago.

Neither wants to talk about that now, and they spoke with each other by telephone recently. Bartlett shares Rove's aversion to revisiting the past. Asked about regrets, Bartlett said, "I can think of a banner on a certain ship," a reference to the infamous "Mission Accomplished" sign behind Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003.

Most of those who have left in recent months are hitting the speaking circuit, considering book contracts or joining consulting firms.

Rove, like many other ex-Bushers, is now trying to distance himself from the president, and the looming shadow of the godawful presidential legacy. He's not 'Bush's Brain' anymore. Karl Rove wants it to be known he is his own man.

"It's not like my life from here forward is going to be defined by it," he said. "I have a chance to create something else. I'm not just going to be typecast as, 'Oh, that's the Bush guy.'"

He'll be lucky if he's remembered even that 'fondly'. Rove's name will be poison for decades to come for tens of millions of Americans, who will see in him all the failures, horror and bloodshed of the George W. Bush presidency, and will wonder how what they're country might have become in war-heavy first decade of the 21st century if they had never come to know the names of Karl Rove and President George W. Bush.

Count Down...

Bush Has 18 Months Left In The White House

Time Enough To Leave A Glorious Legacy

Does President Bush still have time enough to turn his presidency around? To save his legacy? To get Iraq right and to leave something else besides a shattered, near broke country in his wake?

Bush had big plans when he took control of the White House in late 2000. He said he would use a platform of "compassionate conservatism" to transform the country and to rein in government spending. Most of Bush's original agenda has fallen by the wayside. His supporters claim that the 9/11 attacks and the 'War on Terror' is to blame for much that he has failed to complete, but even the projects that got full funding and widespread support, like the education-based No Child Left Behind Act, has soaked up billions and produced few of the promised results.

In eighteen months, a new president, presumably Senator Hillary Clinton, will replace Bush in the Oval Office.

According to this story from CBS News, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Joel Kaplan, claims Bush still has a "very ambitious agenda" to pursue and complete before February, 2009 :

The president still hopes to enact legislation to reduce U.S. consumption of gasoline by 20 percent over 10 years and to make the cost of health insurance tax deductible up to a maximum of $15,000 a year.

But this second term hasn't been kind to Mr. Bush. Despite the claims he made after his re-election that he has political capital to spend, his efforts to pass Social Security and immigration reform bills ended in failure.

Nor do his prospects for the remainder of his term in office look any more promising.

He has all but given up on reforming the U.S. tax code — which during his campaign for a second term, he called a "complicated mess."

The final year and a half of the Bush presidency also presents the prospect of more investigations by and subpoenas from the Democratic Congress. But the administration hopes it won't be hog-tied by them.

Says Kaplan: "It does require the Congress and the Democratic leadership to make a choice of whether they are interested in legislation or whether they're just interested in excessive oversight and fishing expeditions that are designed not to actually accomplish anything for the American people but rather to provide political and communications advantage in some way."

Kaplan has the right to hope, but it looks like the Bush White House is headed into a major showdown with Congress over the president's claims of executive privilege. The issue could end up in the Supreme Court

Further, the 2008 presidential campaign is well under way, and the president's approval ratings are in the cellar.

"I don’t think it will affect in any way what the president tries to pursue on behalf of the American people," says Kaplan. "We’re gonna keep coming to work every day, working on those issues and working with Congress."

The Democrat-controlled Congress is sinking into a political insurgency against Bush Co. and clearly intend to pursue their agenda of probing investigations, senate hearings and possibly charges of perjury against key staffers all the way into the official start of the 2008 election campaign.

And then there's the impeachment issue, which we'll get to in a future post.

Meanwhile, Frosty Wooldridge has some suggestions on how President Bush can best spend his time and the nation's tax dollars in the next 18 months :

Newsweek, in a recent poll, showed that 80 percent of Iraqi citizens want the U.S. military out of their country. Yet Bush overrules their demands with his comment, “Staying in Iraq is necessary work.”

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times said, “When Iraqis beg us to leave, and say we are making things worse--then it’s presumptuous to overrule their wishes and stay indefinitely.”

What if he changed course in the last 18 months of his incompetent presidency? What could he do to create a fantastic legacy?

First of all, each troop deployed in Iraq to stand around and get shot at by Iraqis themselves--costs U.S. taxpayers $390,000.00 a year according to the Congressional Research Service. In 2007, Iraq will cost us $135 billion. That amounts to a quarter of a million dollars per minute, every hour, every day, every week and every year over there.

Bush spends over $10 billion a month to kill and maim our troops in a country that doesn’t want them while we suffer 47 million Americans without health care, 14 million unemployed Americans, $700 billion annual trade deficits, horrific energy crisis and infrastructure failure of our inner cities, roads and bridges. We suffer more problems in this country than you can shake a stick at!

Meanwhile, what could Bush accomplish at home that would make him a hero by the time he thankfully bows out on January 20, 2009? What success might he enjoy if he pulled out of Iraq within three months?

• How about using that $135 billion for national health care for Americans that would cover them for the next 30 years?
• With the $789 billion allocated for the Iraq War, Bush could have created jobs for 14 million unemployed Americans in every sector.
• What about serving in excess of one million homeless in America with health care, housing and job training?
• How about bringing 13 million American children living below the poverty line into the American Dream by allowing their parents job training, housing and hope?
• How about our minority flunk out/drop out rate of 50 to 60 percent from high schools? Wouldn’t an infusion of jobs for their parents and themselves bring about human dignity for our less fortunate Americans?
• Any chance Bush might use those billions of freed-up dollars for research on alternative energy so we might leave the Middle East all together?
• How about all the good will he might engender around the world by stopping his war? World citizens loathe our occupation of Iraq.
• Is it possible he could secure America’s borders from the ‘real’ invasion of our country by millions of illegal migrants and terrorists setting up shop against our culture, language and communities?
• What if he advocated for America’s interests instead corporate elites, the ‘Military Industrial Complex’ and continued $700 billion annual trade deficits?
• Wouldn’t he become a hero if he stopped offshoring, outsourcing and insourcing jobs away from American citizens?
• Can you imagine the tremendous benefits of billions of dollars injected into American school systems to educate and impassion our youth toward productive lives?
• What kind of a hero would Bush become to every mother whose kids suffer addiction to the $130 billion of drugs crossing from Mexico into our communities annually? What if he stopped that national nightmare by placing our troops on our borders to stop drugs? What a concept!
• How about using that money for our pot-holed roads, city slums, dilapidated bridges and our citizens?
• How about a major effort to mitigate climate change? How a national 10 cent deposit/recycle law on every bottle, can and plastic container so we might move toward 100 percent recycling?
• Stop adding to the $8.6 trillion debt. Begin paying it down!
  
• How about Bush upholding his oath of office by enforcing our immigration laws to repatriate 20 million illegal aliens? What a concept! What a boost to law and order! He would become a national hero like Eisenhower.

The Next Presidents "Must Prepare For War"

As we've noted here many times before, President Bush spends a lot of time in interviews musing on how historians will come to view his presidency long after he's dead.

Sometimes these comments from Bush come after questions seeking his thoughts on the subject, but more often Bush drifts away from talking about Iraq, or the 'War on Terror', to muse away on one of his favourite subjects - his own presidential legacy.

In a recent interview, the president was at it again :

"The lesson you learn with the presidency is that it takes a long time - if you're doing big things, it takes a while for history to be able to fully analyse your presidency. There's no such thing as accurate short-term history of a president."

He was asked, directly, what he believes will be his legacy.

"Whatever it is, I'm not going to be around to see it. I hope it is that George Bush fought the war, he laid out a strategy for America and her allies to ultimately defeat these ideologues; he recognised the nature of the enemy" and put in place measures to deal with the threat, he said.

In the same interview, Bush said whoever becomes the next president cannot enter the White House under any illusion that they won't be a President At War. They will be. And so will the next president, and the one after that.

"If the people who say we're not having any war on terror ever gets elected, they'll sit in the office, the Oval Office, and realise we are in a war on terror. They'll realise there are people that are out plotting and planning. They'll see the complexities of taking on this enemy."

"...the realities of sitting in the Oval Office are different from the realities of the campaign, of being on the campaign trail".

"This is a very tough world with an enemy that's determined to hit us. And a president who listens to the intelligence being gathered will realise that the main job for the president here in this part of the 21st century is to defeat the enemy by staying on the offence and, therefore, securing America," he said.

Bush remains firmly of the view that the 'War on Terror' will live to its rebranding as 'The Long War' and will rage on, for many presidents to come.

"Presidents are going to have to keep the pressure on al-Qaeda by using good intel and finding him and pressuring him. At the same time, presidents are going to have to promote ... an alternative ideology to that espoused by these extremists and radicals, and that happens to be one based on liberty."

Bush also said nothing troubles him more than the Americans who have died because he sent them to war.

"My biggest regret thus far is the loss of life, for US casualties. It's the hardest thing for a president when you commit our troops into harm's way, is to know that they have died as a result of your decision."