la résistance

In the final days of his presidency, GWB gave more interviews than any other outgoing American president in history (dubbed the "Bush legacy tour" by the press).

These interviews were derided as further evidence of Bush's lack of self-awareness, demonstrating his ignorance of the consequences of his actions as a president.

And yet... we can't seem to help agreeing with him, as some disasters slip into history and some successes remain.

One signal: W., Oliver Stone's suprisingly sympathetic portrait of our once proud leader.

The nytimes this week wrote about the split between Cheney and Bush over the lack of a Libby pardon. (The nytimes has speculated on such a rift between the two since at least 2005.)

Cheney spent their last days together, furiously lobbying, bringing it up in "countless one-on-one conversations," but did not succeed in the end.

The dispute underscored the raw feelings of Mr. Cheney and other supporters of Mr. Libby, who believed that he was mistreated by prosecutors and ill served by a president who, in their view, failed to return Mr. Libby’s loyalty and sacrifice.

And it points up the distance said to have grown between the two men as their worldviews, once largely in sync, seemed increasingly to diverge in their second term as Mr. Bush took a less hawkish stance.

For Mr. Cheney, the failure to win a pardon was a stinging loss that led him to offer a rare public rebuke of Mr. Bush’s judgment, saying of Mr. Libby in an interview with The Weekly Standard last month that “I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon,” and that “I disagree with President Bush’s decision.”

So what does this mean?

The article quotes unnamed officials early in the article, who said "Mr. Bush was unyielding to the end, already frustrated by a deluge of last-minute pardon requests from other quarters."

Bush was annoyed, eh? "Two former White House officials familiar with the thinking of both men said that Mr. Bush had been generally overwhelmed and surprised by the last-minute lobbying for pardons, but that he had believed he owed it to Mr. Cheney to listen to him as he made one last case for Mr. Libby over the course of several long discussions."

Apparently, he felt uncomfortable with going beyond his initial commuting of Libby's prison sentence, leaving him to serve no jail time. That decision drew a lot of criticism; but later, Bush decided he didn't want to issue disputed pardon in his final hours, like Clinton.

There's something admirable about not caring for criticism, when he knows what he is doing that's right. But the problem comes in the decision-making process, or the lack thereof, in Bush's case.

The article closes with an enigmatic quotation:

A former administration official involved in some of the deliberations said the outcome of the lobbying effort was evidence of something else: “The biggest myth of the presidency is that Vice President Cheney always got his way.”

Read quickly, this suggests that Bush is valiant for standing up to Cheney, the bully.

Read again, and the implications are not so nice. One of the typical Bush apologias is to attribute Bush's mistakes to having the wrong friends, surrounding himself with the wrong people (a la Warren G. Harding, not the Truman Bush wants to be).

Rather than rehabilate Bush, as this anonymous official seems to want, he's stuck with this conclusion: Bush made his own mistakes.

But maybe that's what Bush always wanted us to know. Strength of his own convictions, rather than Teapot Dome. If only he used his head, rather than his gut.