Senile Old People Lose Their Filters

A new biography of the 41st president – Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush – reveals that Bush Sr held Cheney and Rumsfeld responsible for the hawkish stance that “hurt” his son’s administration, Fox News reported on Wednesday.

  Guardian

I seem to recall that actually, it was his own son who loudly pouted that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my dad!" as part of his rationale for invading Iraq.  So, while Cheney and Rumsfeld certainly deserve a goodly portion, I don't think all the blame can be put on those two evil clowns.

The book, by Jon Meacham, is based on audio diaries that Bush recorded during his time in the White House, as well as interviews with the former president and his wife, Barbara.

[...]

“[Cheney's] reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book, which is due to be published next week.

What? Dick Cheney knuckled under to "hard-charging guys"? He was a dove before that? Sure, Poppy. Sure.

“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there – some of it his [Bush Jr], maybe, and some of it the people around him. Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

He added that George W Bush’s infamous state of the union address in 2002, in which the then president warned of an “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything”.

[...]

“He’s my son, he did his best and I’m for him. It’s that simple an equation.”

Simple explains a lot of things about W, but “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything” is quite a torturous dismissal of a world-changing moment.

Rumsfeld, who was Bush Jr’s secretary of defense for most of his two terms, has so far not commented on the criticisms directed at him by the 41st president, who in the book calls him “an arrogant fellow”, adding: “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president.

Who was just a simple man who did his best.

And look at the state of the world now.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.