Thomas Friedman on Bush's Third Term

Thomas Friedman on Bush’s Third Term

If only Thomas Friedman would face reality with regards to 9/11 Iraq today’s column would be excellent. Hopefully some day he will realize that 9/11 was a case of gross incompetence in governing followed by disgusting political moves to take advantage of an attack which a competent President would have taken steps to prevent, and that Iraq was a folly from the start. Ignoring these portions of the column, he has some thoughts on George Bush worth repeating. He considers Bush to now be in a third term, with conditions so different from how the actual second term began:

President George W. Bush has just entered his third term. That’s right. He’s a three-term president. His first term was from 2001 to 2004, and it was dominated by 9/11, which Mr. Bush skillfully used to take a hard-right Republican agenda on taxes and war with Iraq, which was going nowhere on 9/10, and drive it into a 9/12 world.

His second term was very brief. It lasted from his re-election in November 2004 until Election Day 2005. This was an utterly wasted term. It was dominated by an attempt to privatize Social Security, which the country rejected, political scandals involving I. Lewis Libby Jr., Tom DeLay and Bill Frist, a ham-fisted response to Katrina and a mishandling of the Iraq war to such a degree that many Democrats and Republicans have begun to vote “no confidence” in the Bush-Cheney war performance. If ours were a parliamentary system, Mr. Bush would have had to resign by now.

So now begins Mr. Bush’s third term. What will he do with it? The last time Mr. Bush hit rock bottom - then from too much drinking - he found God and turned his life around. Now that he has hit rock bottom again - this time from drinking in too much Karl Rove - the question is whether he can find America and turn his presidency around.

When I watch Mr. Bush these days, though, he looks to me like a man who wishes that we had a 28th amendment to the Constitution - called “Can I Go Now?” He looks like someone who would prefer to pack up and go back to his Texas ranch. It’s not just that he doesn’t seem to be having any fun. It’s that he seems to be totally out of ideas relevant to the nation’s future.

Since there is no such clause, Mr. Bush has two choices. One is to continue governing as though he’s still running against John McCain in South Carolina. That means pushing a hard-right strategy based on dividing the country to get the 50.1 percent he needs to push through more tax cuts, while ignoring our real problems: the deficit, health care, energy, climate change and Iraq. More slash-and-burn politics like that will be a disaster.