Pissed Away

I resisted posting about this picture last night, even as it rocketed around the blogosphere last night. Though it appeared at an opportune, and perhaps auspicious moment, I held off because I couldn’t help wondering about the veracity of the picture. After all, I’ve been fooled before, by embarassing photos of Bush that later turned out to be fake. But this one comes from reputable source (Reuters) so there may this really is a picture of president Bush, writing a note to Condi requesting a bathroom break.

It wouldn’t be the first time news cameras caught the president in a somewhat embarassing moment. There was the one in which he was photographed with other world leaders, with his fly open. Still, I was reluctant to post anything until this morning when Snopes posted it as "undetermined," but also had this to say about the integrity of the photographer.

We don’t doubt the authenticity of the photograph, as Rick Wilking is an established photographer with 12 years’ experience shooting news photos in Washington (including various White House assignments) who recently covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (leaving that city only, according to Editor & Publisher, "after his laptop and two cameras were stolen from his car parked near the convention center"). As well, Reuters carried other pictures of the same scene from the United Nations, including one that appears to have captured the back of President Bush’s head. We’ve left this as "undetermined" for now to allow for the possibility that the President was merely responding to or adding comments to a note written by someone else.

While there’s noting paricularly remarkable about the the reality that even the president has bodily functions, coming when it does for this administraition — on the heels of a shameful failure of the federal government in the wake of hurricane Katrina (and the president’s admission of responsibility), and as things continue to head south in Iraq — seems to signify a certain shift in attitude towards the Bush administration, both in the media and in the American public.

Consider for a moment that Reuters didn’t have to publish this picture. They could have deemed it too disrespectful of the president, and tossed it in the garbage. If it had been taken a few years ago, after September 11th and before the war in Iraq, it would probably have never seen the light of day. But its appearance now — this picture in which hte president seems to be asking for permission to go to the bathroom, even if he isn’t — suggests a certain loss of respect for the administration and the man at its helm.

Immediately after 9/11, publishing such a photograph would have been unthinkable, and would probably have been considered unpatriotic. Fast-forward to 2005, and the president has become the butt of a bathroom joke. What happened? What happened to the political capital Bush had after 9/11 — with a great many Americans as well as the rest of the world — and again after the 2004 election? Even some conservatives say that it’s now all been pissed away.

It’s time for us conservatives to face facts. George W. Bush has pissed away the conservative moment by pursuing a war of choice via policies that border on the criminally incompetent. We control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and (more-or-less) the judiciary for one of the few times in my nearly 5 decades, but what have we really accomplished? Is government smaller? Have we hacked away at the nanny state? Are the unborn any more protected? Have we really set the stage for a durable conservative majority?

…What really annoys me, however, are the domestic implications of all this. The conservative agenda has advanced hardly at all since the Iraq War began. Worse yet, the growing unpopularity of the war threatens to undo all the electoral gains we conservatives have achieved in this decade. Stalwarts like me are not going to vote for Birkenstock wearers no matter how bad things get in Iraq, but what about the proverbial soccer moms?

The domestic implicaitons have been made clear now. Any arguments to the contrary have effectively been washed away by the winds and flood waters of hurricane Katrina. We may debate whether the size of the federal government has gotten larger or smaller (though it appears to have grown larger), but anyone with eyes to see can’t at this point can’t deny that its ability to respond effectively in crisis has been seriously hampered, with disastrous results. Even "soccer moms" who voted for Bush in ’04 now have to be wondering how the administration can protect their families against terrorist attacks when it responds so poorly to a natural disaster about which it had multiple advance warnings. Polls bear that out.  And the pictures of an American city looking more like a city in a Third World country that have flashed around the world can’t help but erode international confidence in the U.S.

The American pubilc has lost confidence in this president, and the rest of the world is losing faith in the U.S. It all seems to be swirling around the drain now. One year into a second term, is the presidency of George W. Bush alrdeady over?

The Bush Era is over. The sooner politicians in both parties realize that, the better for them — and the country.

Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush’s government doesn’t work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.

The Bush Era did not begin when he took office, or even with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It began on Sept. 14, 2001, when Bush declared at the World Trade Center site: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." Bush was, indeed, skilled in identifying enemies and rallying a nation already disposed to action. He failed to realize after Sept. 11 that it was not we who were lucky to have him as a leader, but he who was lucky to be president of a great country that understood the importance of standing together in the face of a grave foreign threat. Very nearly all of us rallied behind him.

…And so the Bush Era ended definitively on Sept. 2, the day Bush first toured the Gulf Coast States after Hurricane Katrina. There was no magic moment with a bullhorn. The utter failure of federal relief efforts had by then penetrated the country’s consciousness.

So, back to the picture. The president "has to go," and now we can all see it as plainly as the writing on our computer monitors. But the problem is that he’s still got three years to hang around, and how he handles them is pretty much up to him (and his advisors). We know how willing this administration has been in the recent past to admit its done anthing wrong, and to make up for it. So, while this low point for the administration is something of an opportuinty as well — if handled with a realization that their way really hasn’t worked all that well — we can be reasonably sure that they will piss away this chance as well.

Yes, the president has to go. But the reality is thati it’s going to take a long time. And, to extend the metaphor, we — the American public — will have to hold it, shake it for him, and zip him up before he’s finally out the door.