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11 January 2008:

James Wolcott on Books About Bush, in Vanity Fair.

If I were a better scholar, and completely immodest as well, I would work through the Friday Fronts that I've been writing on and off since 2002 with a view to tracing the growth of my conviction — for it has become a conviction — that accusations of failure aimed at the Bush regime are, in the words of the great Hamilton Burger, incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. The Bushies have been a great success by their own lights, and they couldn't give a damn about anybody else's. Even before Katrina relief left New Orleans's black population in trailers located everywhere but in the Crescent City, I suspected that the ruling principal at the White House was "take the money and run."

This view of things, found, except with respect to the oil of Iraq, only at the fringes of political discourse and deemed until quite recently to be excessively paranoid or cynical or something, receives a chilly embrace from James Wolcott in the February issue of Vanity Fair (sadly, the piece is not online). In his column, "How Bush Stacks Up," Mr Wolcott runs through some recent entries in the leaning tower of Bush studies before running into Jim Holt's piece in the London Review of Books, "It's the Oil, Stupid" (discussed in these pages here.)

But perhaps we're the ones living in Bizarro World, not the Bushies. Maybe from their vantage point inside the mother ship nearly everything's worked as intended, if not exactly as planned, and those in the highest circles have no more reason to examine their consciences or re-trace their steps than the perpetrators of a successful heist. For years, a few voices on the radical edges of the blogosphere have contended that sowing chaos in the Middle East, privatizing war to enrich their corporate sponsors, and letting things slide to hell at home were what the lords of misrule wanted — that the bungling and incompetence of the war and Katrina weren't bugs, but features. After all, the post-Katrina diaspora has redounded to the benefit of the Republicans with the election of Bobby Jindal to the Louisiana governorship, his victory made possible in part by the dispersement of black voters displaced by the floods.

Oh, those nasty Republicans! Next! Doubters appear to wonder how Republicans can ever thought that they'd get away with so nefarious — so openly nefarious — an agenda. Even assuming that they are getting away with it, where did they ever get the nerve? The answer, I think, is that they sized up the likely liberal opposition pretty well, and understood that it would be limited to articulate East Coast critical thinkers like me — or like James Wolcott, if you prefer. They realized something that I think about every day, and in vain: I have nothing to say to anyone who would vote for George W Bush. I might as well speak Latin or Klingon. It is I who am incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. Somehow, knowing what's going on doesn't matter. Something else matters, and I don't know what it is.

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