Frank Rich has an excellent OpEd piece this morning and I urge you to read it. This is just a glimpse.
"We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He's the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.
The last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush's presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he's not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street and even into the heavesn, which have been a saafe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it."
The whole article is worth reading. It just makes me wonder all over again how this man was ever elected president -- but then he wasn't really, was he? More squirrelly politics and too many people not paying attention, too much shoulder shrugging. I do hope we've learned the lesson to be learned here. And I hope somewhere along the line we get an improved voting system.
