Failed Excuses for Bush
A Footnote to Krugman

I'm not a big Krugman fan, but I think he gets things pretty much right in yesterday's column. The points aren't original, but they're worth making clearly and repeatedly: Bush wasn't unlucky, he was incompetent (and dishonest, intellectually and otherwise). And he didn't fail because he was insufficiently conservative. Rather he was scrupulously conservative in as many ways as he could manage to be.

But the alleged "party of personal responsibility" has quickly turned into the party of whining and excuse-making. Their boy--who they dug out of relative obscurity, shoved into power via the quasi-coup of the 2000 election, and supported enthusiastically and unwaveringly (until it became politically convenient, during the last election, to hint that he maybe hadn't been so good after all...but that McCain would be different!)--ran the country and the world into a ditch. But conservatives are ready with a vast array of excuses:

1. It was just bad luck!
Here they focus on Katrina, and in particular on the meteorological facts. Of course no one could have stopped the hurricane...but that doesn't excuse the administration's response to it. And it has nothing to do with the administration's crimes, for which they bear the full share of responsibility. Consider the biggest crime--Iraq--which was not only deliberate, but which could not have happened without diligent and semi-constant deception aimed at tricking the public into supporting a head-spinningly idiotic war. Even 9/11 cannot be attributed entirely to bad luck, as the Bush administration deliberately ignored warnings from the Clinton administration, largely because they held Clinton and company in such contempt.

2. Bush wasn't conservative enough!
A type of defense beloved of political extremists. Like the old leftist defenders of the USSR, these Bush dead-enders would have you believe that conservatism didn't fail--it hasn't even really been tried yet! (As a sidebar, note that this is the only type of criticism many radical feminists will countenance against any feminist position: it's not radical enough.) Nothing ever counts as evidence against conservatism! If a given administration is a flop, this can only be evidence that it wasn't conservative after all. That conservatism is true is a necessary truth, irrefutable by mere facts.

3. History will vindicate him!
Another all-purpose defense. Total, absolute, flat-out failure in all recognizable ways? Hell, appeal to the long view. The very, very long view if necessary. It's a way of making all currently-available evidence seem irrelevant. So you can always use this defense. Attila the Hun, bad??? Well, we'll just have to wait for the conclusion of history. 1600 years not enough time? Well, who knows what the historians of 3000 A.D. will say...

Of course we know very well what they will say. This lame defense doesn't actually make available evidence irrelevant--all it does is remind us that our conclusions are fallible. Future historians might learn something relevant and exculpatory about Bush--but the currently-available evidence is strong enough to make that unlikely. Possible, yes; probable, no. We know enough to know that history will, in all probability, not look at all kindly on Dubya. And, remember: we can make the same argument in reverse. It's just as likely (perhaps more likely) that future historians will discover that Bush is even worse than we think. (Though perhaps something akin to regression to the mean would make that improbable, come to think of it...) History, we might counter-assert, will not vindicate Bush, but condemn him even more strongly.

4. It's basically a problem of perception--Bush's unpopularity is inexplicable.
A real howler, but in keeping with the general world-view of our first "CEO president": everything is basically a marketing problem. Does the Middle East hate us? Surely we just need to hire a propaganda Czar to persuade them that everything we do is optimal. No good reason to conduct that tempting war? Just gin up a marketing campaign to bring people along. Bush's approval rating in the shitter? Clearly it can't be an accurate reflection of Bush's accomplishments...it's public opinion that needs to be changed, not Bush's approach to governance.

You could go crazy thinking too much about the deep stupidity and irrationality of these attempts to defend the indefensible. But, in keeping with my new policy of Not Letting It Get To Me, I'm just going to complain about it here, and then move on...