BUSH’S BRAIN….The Washington Post has more dirt from Robert Draper’s new Bush bio, Dead Certain, today. Turns out Karl Rove didn’t want Bush to pick Dick Cheney as VP but Bush figured it couldn’t do any harm. Score one for Karl. Rove also had doubts about appointing Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Score two for Karl. On the other hand, Rove also favored keeping Donald Rumsfeld on as Secretary of Defense when Bush polled his advisors in mid-2006. And Bush “hit the roof” when he learned that Rove knew about Valerie Plame after all, even after telling Bush otherwise. So call it even on the Rove-O-Meter.
What else? The White House was like a war zone, with senior aides refusing to talk to each other. Cheney thinks the main mistake we made in Iraq was not immediately installing a provisional government, just like Ahmed Chalabi recommended.
But wait. This was supposed to be a book about Bush, wasn’t it? What does it say about him? Lessee. The Secret Service went crazy trying to keep up with Bush’s demand for presidential bike trails whenever he was on the road. (That’s why Bush was so quiet on that famous pre-Katrina videocon with FEMA head Michael Brown: he was tuckered out from a bike ride at the ranch.) He really did believe that “democracy would spring forth with little effort” in Iraq after the invasion. He doesn’t really remember how and why the Iraqi army got disbanded. And he thinks Bill Clinton is a git for doing dumb stuff like hanging out at the UN in his post-presidential career.
Quite a guy, our president.
