Certainly Mr. Bush

Slate has a three part excerpt from Robert Draper's Dead Certain. Draper had unprecedented access to Bush and most of the excerpts consist of interview. I felt that there was a certain pathos to the Bush that emerged. The famously upbeat Bush who seems to be so out of touch with reality seems to be partly a pose put on to keep up others spirits and his own:

"And part of being a leader is: people watch you. I walk in that hall, I say to those commanders—well, guess what would happen if I walk in and say, 'Well, maybe it's not worth it.' When I'm out in the public"—and now he was fully animated, yanked out of his slouch and his eyes clenched like little blue fists—"I fully understand that the enemy watches me, the Iraqis are watching me, the troops watch me, and the people watch me.

"The other thing is that you can't fake it. You have to believe it. And I believe it. I believe we'll succeed."

More upsetting, and more pathetic, is the man who understands that a President needs a strategic vision, a man who claims to read history by the bucketfull, but when trying to articulate that stategic vision can't get beyond muddled slogans:

"The job of the president," he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, "is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can't play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You've gotta think, think BIG. The Iranian issue," he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin, "is the strategic threat right now facing a generation of Americans, because Iran is promoting an extreme form of religion that is competing with another extreme form of religion. Iran's a destabilizing force. And instability in that part of the world has deeply adverse consequences, like energy falling in the hands of extremist people that would use it to blackmail the West. And to couple all of that with a nuclear weapon, then you've got a dangerous situation. ... That's what I mean by strategic thought...

If nothing else, a good argument against legacy admits.

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