Ya know, I don’t suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Life is too short. And besides—I took one look at him on the campaign trail back in 2000 and immediately remembered the overprivileged Republican WASP dicks I was unfortunate enough to live among (as a not-WASP and not-Republican) during my coming-of-age and pinpointed him as a mean, arrogant, entitled son of a bitch. When Gore (also entitled and overprivileged, but one of “mine”—namely, a Democrat) lost the election that was his to lose and Bush “won,” Bush became for me just one more president to ignore, as I had ignored Reagan for eight long years.

I certainly haven’t been proven wrong. Bush is eminently ignorable, and a mean, arrogant son of a bitch to boot. Nevertheless, after the terrible events of 9/11, I was forced to think long and hard about geopolitics, read as much as I could, and ended up supporting his mission to topple Saddam, liberate the godforsaken Iraqis from Saddam’s evil clutches, and try to bring some semblance and idea of normalcy into the lives of the Muslims of the Middle East. With my family background—born to parents who had suffered the twin evils of Nazism and Stalinism—I could see from far away the totalitarian threat from Islamism.

I believed that the future of our interconnected world was at stake in this fight, that the Enlightened West had to do something to stop the terrible slide into darkness of the Muslim Middle East.

Was I wrong? I don’t know. No one knows, because no one can see ten or twenty years down the road to a time when perhaps things will be different, as they are today for example in Eastern Europe nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So that’s where I stand on Bush: I think he did the right thing in Iraq (regardless of his reasons) but that he blew it, disastrously and at a cost (moral, economic, social) we’ll be carrying for decades. Grimly, I supported the surge, too, having read about Petraeus years earlier. He seemed to have the right stuff to make a difference in Iraq. And indeed there is a small difference in Iraq: al Qaeda is on the ropes and on the run. For now. We seem to have acquired some breathing room, just barely. There is some small hope that the breathing room will grow and that the country that lays in ruins today will somehow, someday rise from the ashes. Maybe.

And then today I read this grotesque happy talk“It’s Morning in America Because Bush is the Best” piece by Bush and Cheney lapdog Ron Christie, which claims that Bush has been a genius and a hero—and that his successes are surging—and I just want to hurl myself off a cliff:

Recent polls placing President Bush’s approval numbers near 30 percent miss an important distinction: The policies and positions the president has advocated since 2001 have led to significant results in recent days. In short, the presidency of George W. Bush is surging, rather than waning, with little more than one year remaining in his term.

Wait. There’s more:

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. …

More Americans have more money in their savings accounts and in their wallets as a result of the Bush tax cuts. …

Roundly criticized back in 2001 for his position on stem cell research, the president’s resolve and strength to draw a moral boundary line to protect innocent unborn life has been vindicated. …

And most deluded of all, a happy picture of Iraq:

This decrease in violence has led thousands of civilians to return to the country each and every day to reopen their schools, businesses and neighborhoods that have long been abandoned due to violence.

In Mosul, the airport opened for the first time in 14 years for commercial aviation flights. In a region of the country long associated with violence, Iraqi Airlines is now open for business. While there is always a potential for violence to flare up, Iraqi civilians have returned home to provinces all around the country that had previously been strongholds held by terrorists and Saddam loyalists.

[e.a.]

I didn’t buy Frank Rich’s argument that Bush went to war in Iraq in order to secure a victory (and thus the 2004 election): there was ample reason to go to war, and many liberals understood those reasons and supported them.

But to hear a former Bush administration lapdog now declare victory is beyond sick-making. Words fail me. Hear me whimper.

Mickey Kaus takes a whack at The New Yorker:

**–You won’t learn much else from Lizza’s article. It’s … not one of his best! A classic dumbed-down Remnick-era New Yorker piece–remedial reading for U.W.S. cocooners. Lizza skips over all the wonkish aspects of the immigration debate (like whether “comprehensive” reform will actually work) as if they have nothing to do with the politics, paints opponents as unfeeling racists, ignores well-publicized evidence (e.g., from Carville and Greenberg) that Democrats might have political problems from supporting legalization, falls for the recent Pew hype and generally fits the issue into a comfortable Civil Rights template (moral moderates vs. pathetic bigots). Did I mention that it’s a bad piece?

As long as we’re tearing down our journalistic institutions, why not The New Yorker? It’s not all that. Not anymore.

Andrew Sullivan links to a tragic comment, left somewhere on the Web by a teacher:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

I blame the writers’ strike: with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not around to tell everyone what’s going on, people don’t get their news.

Better infotainment, please—and more of it!

After centuries of being cut off from the greatest works of Western thought—and from standard works of Western thought as well—Arabic-speaking people will soon—finally!—be able to have access to translations of some of the books that changed the world:

It’s been 375 years since Galileo published his earth-shaking Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 336 since John Milton wrote Paradise Regained and nearly 40 since James D. Watson had an apparent international bestseller with The Double Helix, about the discovery of the structure of DNA. Amazingly, however, none of these books, and thousands of classics like them, has ever been translated into Arabic, the first tongue of more than 300 hundred million persons worldwide.

Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.

Karim Nagy, the entrepreneur who is the force behind this effort, which is being funded by Abu Dhabi, says that money is no object:

Nagy said “funding is the least of our concerns. It’s the quality of the translation that counts.” Indeed, Abu Dhabi is the wealthiest of all the emirates and Abu Dhabi city is ranked as the richest in the world. Nagy said Kalima is striving to find a balance between wanting the Arab world to “catch up” with the classics, most of which are in the public domain, and “keeping up” with recent and current literature, which requires copyright clearance.

Also: Nagy has no political or religious agenda:

Nagy insists Kalima has “no political or religious agenda,” and points to its decision to publish John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom alongside such Marxist tomes as Reading Capital by Louis Althusser and Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Also on tap is the Yiddish-to-Arabic translation of The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ethic s by the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Being a passionate devotee of books, I say it is this kind of effort—and not war—that will change the world most profoundly. The question is how long it will take to bring enlightenment to people who have been kept in darkness for so long.

But the desire is there, as Doris Lessing wrote in her Nobel acceptance speech:

The school in the blowing dust of northwest Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at those mildly expectant faces and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without text books, or an atlas, or even a map pinned up on a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only eighteen or nineteen themselves, they beg for books. … Everybody, everyone begs for books: “Please send us books”.

Yes, let us send books—the very best of ourselves.