Frank Rich on W's Legacy Tour

Frank Rich of the New York Times sums up the failures of George W. Bush succinctly in Sunday's column.

The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.

He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”

In denying responsibility for the current economic meltdown, Bush repeats a claim heard frequently from right-wing media: it's all Clinton's fault. If this is true, doesn't it make W. a bigger incompetent than even his critics claim for sitting passively on a financial time-bomb for almost eight years?

--Ballard Burgher