Friday,
June 13, 2008
Bush
The
ANNOTICO Report
There's
nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details
like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of
They
tired of Bush's brittle bravado, and deficiency of temperament.
Nobody's been itching to present Bush with a diplomatic triumph,
An
ungenerous temperament does not inspire generosity
Bush Does
Spiegel OnLine
From The New York Times
Roger Cohen
June
12, 2008
An American
president is in
Of course, a
couple of months ago an American president went to a NATO summit in Bucharest,
Romania, and said Georgia and Ukraine should be on a fast track to membership,
and nobody listened. That was a moment, too. Last time I checked, NATO without
the
The president had
choreographed his
But that's not my
subject here.
The
American president, of course, is George W. Bush. He's doing a
farewell lap, or limp, around European capitals, or retreats. His German
stop has been in downtown Meseberg. A rapturous
"Ich bin ein Crawforder".
Has a ring to it, even if it's as meaningless as this exit tour.
But
Bush-bashing has become a bore. I won't indulge in it, except to say one more
thing.
US Supreme Court
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described President Franklin D. Roosevelt as
"a second-class intellect but a first-rate temperament." Bush's
endless malapropisms have made his intellect the object of ridicule. But
his mind was not the problem. It's a better mind than his "nukelar" trashing of language suggests.
Bush's
chip-on-the-shoulder temperament is another matter. He has proved mean,
vindictive, surly, controlling and impatient, as befits his guns-at-the-ready
gait.
Apologizing for tough-guy rhetoric now, as he has, is no remedy. There's
nothing worse than a control-freak chief executive with no interest in details
like the disbanding of the Iraqi Army or the strength of
This
deficiency of temperament has been devastating.
This desultory
stroll
around a
In selecting Barack Obama and John McCain as
the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively, Americans have chosen
men in full, unafraid to betray contradictions. They are tired of brittle
bravado. With Bush, they have seen that, after a certain age, you get the face
you deserve.
So Bush goes
not with a bang, but a whimper. That's not just about him. Europe and
For the
Still, a
lesson of the Bush presidency has been that trans-Atlantic cooperation matters. Its absence in
Bush, in
Let's face it, now
that the curtain's almost down, nobody's been itching to present Bush with a
diplomatic triumph, whether in
Just before Bush
showed up in
He talked about
the 10 hours of video being uploaded on YouTube every
minute of every day. He talked about the world?s 3 billion mobile devices, with another billion
coming in the next three years. He described the "largest increase in
expressive capability in the history of the human race"
Connectivity:
pass it on. We need an American president who embodies it, in
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