re: Dead Certainties

Bush’s Deadly Certainties

Candide's Notebooks -Pierre Tristam

In his book “Dead Certainties, Unwarranted Speculations” from back in 1992, the unconventional historian Simon Schama explored the gulf between the “lived event and its subsequent narration.” The two can be vastly different, depending on the quality of your spin-meister. In his book “Dead Certainty,” an extended profile of George W. Bush, Robert Draper paints the picture of a president given dangerously and entirely to reinventing everything, but absolutely everything, in his image, however divorced from reality. As Michiko Kakutani writes in the Times,

It is a portrait of the commander in chief as a willful optimist, proud of his self-confidence and convinced that any expressions of doubt would make him less of a leader: a man addicted to “Big Ideas and small comforts” (like riding his bike), a stubborn, even obstinate politician loath to change course or second-guess himself, and given to valuing loyalty above almost everything else.

The result: a presidency at the improv, the improv being the seat of Bush’s pants, themselves a crease away from his guts. We find out along the way the astounding revelation that John Roberts, the chief justice, was actually the one who suggested Harriet Miers as a Supreme Court nominee,m which gives you an idea of the shallowness lurking beneath those baby blues of Roberts’s (whether he has blue eyes or not is irrelevant: he packaged himself, in his confirmation hearings, as a baby-blue boy. It worked, obviously). Further:

This is a president who says he cries easily and often about dead and wounded soldiers, a president who Mr. Draper says doesn’t defer, as widely believed, to Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rove (who apparently recommended that Mr. Cheney not be put on the 2000 ticket, arguing, in Mr. Draper’s words, that picking “Daddy’s top foreign-policy guy ran counter to message.”) Mr. Draper tells us that the president repeated his conviction that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction to his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., “all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006, almost exactly three years after the Coalition had begun its fruitless search for WMD’s.”

Are you reading this? Are his diehard supporters reading this? Delusion as faith, delusion as policy, delusion as the bullet in the chamber that keeps ensnaring soldiers and Iraqis. No surprise, he dislikes bad news, so his closest aides, like Card, like the increasingly pathetic Condi Rice, like Rove, don’t deliver bad news to him. “[T]his volume is studded with examples — on matters ranging from the Iraq war to Hurricane Katrina — of aides failing to deliver distressing information to the president or failing to persuade him to grapple quickly with unfortunate developments.” That’s right in line with what Draper describes as Bush’s “almost petulant heedlessness to the outside world.” Why almost?