The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11

The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11
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Our good president has been making his political rounds with pronounced zest in what appears to be a valiant effort to prove he is still relevant. One day he is Bush the Adventurer, the man who blundered into Iraq -- talking up the evils of Iran and the possibility of World War III. The next day he is Bush the Abominable No-Man, keeping health care out of the greedy hands of poor kids.

These are but two of the horrifying personas of this president. There is also the mortifying "I can’t believe he’s my president" persona. This president is the backslapper, the one who calls himself "the decider", the fellow who drops his dog on its head. He’s the one who opened the conference of the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) by thanking Australian prime minister John Howard "for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit" -- OPEC being the cartel of mostly Middle Eastern oil producers. This president then thanked Howard for the presence of his "Austrian" troops in Iraq and marched confidently offstage -- in the wrong direction.

A few weeks later the same president attended an elementary school in New York in order to crow about higher national test scores. "Childrens do learn!" he proclaimed, creating a Norm Crosby-ish bookend for his infamous "Is our children learning?" anguish of a few years ago.

I wouldn’t want to draw conclusions as to the cause of this recent spate of malapropisms, but a new book by former British foreign secretary Lord Owen may supply a clue. In 'The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair, and the Intoxication of Power', Owen recalls the time in 2002 when the commander in chief collapsed while sitting on a sofa watching a football game. (Official cause: he’d choked on a pretzel.) The presidential head hit a table on the way to the floor, he suffered an abrasion on the left side of his face and a blood sample was rushed to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Owen says he was told by a British doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins that lab technicians there found that the blood contained significant amounts of alcohol -- this in the body of a man who claims he hasn’t had a drop in more than 20 years.

The president stayed on message in Washington last November when he gave Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird", the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. First he quoted an early review of the book: "A hundred pounds of sermons on tolerance, or an equal measure of invective deploring the lack of it, will weigh far less in the scale of enlightenment than a mere 18 ounces of a new fiction bearing the title "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Beautiful words. Stirring.

Then Bush went on to say, in his own words, "We’re moved by the story of a man falsely accused -- with old prejudice massed against him, and an old sense of honor that rises to his defense."

Am I the only one who found these sentiments an outrage, inasmuch as they came from the mouth of a man who has endorsed acts of extraordinary rendition and torture often based on slim evidence and racial profiling? I can only imagine what was going through Harper Lee’s mind at the time.

With regard to the president’s favorite pastime -- namely, wondering what his place in history will be -- historians should heed the counsel of fans of our national pastime, who are uniquely equipped to assess the commander in chief’s judgment and fore sight. Back in the mid-90s, professional baseball owners were deciding whether to enact a wild-card rule, which would allow a second-place team in each league the chance to get into the playoffs. When the 28 owners came to decide on the new rule, only one voted against it -- only one -- and that was our very own president, then the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers.

Since then, nearly a third of World Series champions have been wild-card teams, and the rule change is credited with helping baseball regain its standing following the brutal seven-month players’ strike that began in 1994. "History will prove me right," Bush bellowed at the time of the vote. "This is an exercise in folly."

One of the people who think they can do a better job than the president let me correct that: one of the people who *think* they can do a better job than the president, and are actively chasing the position is New York’s own banty visionary Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. 9/11 himself. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: one second before that first plane flew into the World Trade Center tower, Giuliani was one of the most disliked mayors in New York history. Grasping, petty, and vengeful, he was the sort of politician who runs for higher office not so much because he can, then reward those who helped him along, but because he can then punish those who didn’t.

It could reasonably be said that Giuliani shone on 9/11 and during its aftermath. And he’s been shining that 9/11 badge ever since. Indeed, with the possible exception of Osama bin Laden, nobody has cashed in more on that fateful day. As Michael Shnayerson illustrates so clearly in "A Tale of Two Giulianis", his unflinching look at the former mayor’s professional dealings, the post-9/l1 Giuliani has gone into business with a number of companies of less than stellar reputation. This is all legal, if a bit tawdry, for a former mayor. But it’s not really what you go looking for in a future head of state.

-GRAYDON CARTER -- Vanity Fair Editor