The Insufferably, shallow Bush Gang

Whistling Unscathed through the Graveyard

P.M. Carpenter

I'm not sure what to make of this morning's Washington Post's blubbering perambulation through the wreckage -- "An Exit Toward Soul-Searching: As Bush Staffers Leave, Questions About Legacy Abound" -- other than the strikingly evident: these are profoundly shallow people who, being profoundly shallow, seem to have learned nothing.

In interviewing several of the bureaucratically fallen, the Post's Peter Baker presents a picture of bittersweet youth, as told by the sorrowful ones. But it's not Mr. Baker's fault that their attempts at displaying emotional depth will only cause one to heave breakfast. Perhaps it is merely their youth that colors their comments with astounding self-absorption and denial, but if the interviewees were intent on sounding genuinely bittersweet, they missed the mark by several parsecs.

Representative of this mindset is Liza Wright, who recently left the White House as its personnel director. "It's a killer of a job," she said, without noting -- without, probably, even grasping -- that the real and quite literal killer jobs are those held far down the chain of command. No, her reflective remembrances are all about her 14-hour days, of which she'll have many, many more, unlike the thousands of poor bastards overseas subjected daily to the White House's 14-hour installments of inveterate bumbling.

Then there's William Inboden, recently the senior director for something oxymoronically called the National Security Council's strategic planning division. Bill takes a stab at the big picture: "There's this overriding awareness that we're living and acting for the judgment of history." Translation: Don't rush to judgment, since any such judgment would be unavoidably, conclusively devastating -- rather, let's revel in the distraction of abstraction; let's all wait 30 or 40 years, when detached historians who didn't live under this hellish administration take a contrarian whack at warping the real history of it.

And there is the former White House director of strategic initiatives, Peter Wehner, who boldly dismisses attempts at abstraction and opts instead for the resounding understatement. Their "intentions were noble," he said, yet "the fact that [the war] didn't go so well is something you struggle with." Yes, but somehow, Peter, as you struggle on your iPhone to and from your Georgetown apartment in your BMW convertible, we're all confident you have what it takes to get over it.

Or, there's Meghan O'Sullivan, who served as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. Meghan's choice of soothing personal defense is that of the desperate and delusional gambler, throwing perfectly good human life and money down a rat hole after the stupendously bad. "You're always thinking: Is this worth it? Is this going to be worth it? What justifies the level of sacrifices on both the U.S. and Iraqi side? I believe as long as the possibility of being successful's there, you can justify continuing the effort." It's like doubling down on thirteen.

But the very best of these best and brightest I have saved for last -- the not-so-young, recently departed Karl Rove. How does Karl cope with it all? How does all the death and destruction of the past few years touch him personally? How does he choose to memorialize it?

Well, Karl "keeps a newspaper picture of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby and his wife on the day Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak case. Rove says he holds onto it to remember. 'I'm really sad about Scooter,' he said.

"He is not depressed, he said more than once. 'Hey, man, that was my life,' he said. 'It's not my life now. One of the reasons I don't think I'm depressed is I'm always looking forward.'"

What an admirable stiff upper lip. What an admirable guy.

Every one of these folks has a bright, prosperous future, unlike their victims. But not one has the cerebral, emotional or genital fortitude to admit what all the world knows: They blew it. Most were merely oafish kids led by older clowns led by a clown. The broad swaths of death, destruction and ideological debauchery they collectively left behind are lighted in flashing neon, and they're blind to it all.

In a just world, their futures would be colored in orange clothing. But each, instead, will go on to affluent captaincies of industry or comfortable ivory towers, where they'll forever and self-deceptively hold forth on their professional but innocent experiences in organized crime.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.