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By Michael Winship
News of President Bush's weekend colonoscopy and the successful removal of five benign, non-cancerous polyps put me in mind of Evelyn Waugh's comment after the disagreeable Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, underwent a somewhat similar procedure.
Leave it to medical science, the novelist said, to remove the only part of Randolph that wasn't malignant.
A bit harsh, perhaps, and a gibe that these days might be more truly aimed at our vice president, Lord Voldemort, than the current chief executive. Nevertheless, with his approval rating as low as 26 percent and whatever meager prospects left quickly fading to black, it's easier, more popular - and safer - to crack wise about the president than ever.
Contrast such insult humor with the sentiments expressed in the December 3, 2001 issue of Newsweek, not quite three months after 9/11, and you'll see just how deeply disenchanted we've become.
President Bush, the magazine's Howard Fineman and Martha Brant wrote, "has been a model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness. His basic military strategy ... has proved astute. He has been eloquent in public, commanding in private. He had survived the first blows, made the right calls and exceeded expectations - again."
The commander-in-chief doesn't read much in the way of history books, the article continued. "He's busy making history, but doesn't look back at his own, or the world's.... Bush would rather look forward than backward. It's the way he's built."
As my late great uncle and lifelong Baptist W. F. "Bubba" Downs of Temple, Texas, would say: Oy.
But now, it seems, the president is desperate to find his place in history, to search its tomes, old and new, and grill its authors for redemption and justification. Posterity suddenly has become the focus group about which he cares the most.
Three weeks ago, a front-page, 3000-word article in the Washington Post began, "At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers.... What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done?
"... These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation. Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his administration."
And yet, indications are that despite what the books and scholars try so hard to tell him, he still only hears the parts he wants to hear.
One of the books he has admired is Sir Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," about France's defeat in the Algerian War for Independence nearly fifty years ago.
As Salon.com's Gary Kamiya wrote in May, the fact that the Bush administration would gravitate toward Horne's book "is one of the remarkable intellectual ironies in recent years... [It] recounts the inevitable defeat of a colonialist power at the hands of a small but determined group of insurgents, the National Liberation Front, who effectively used terrorism to win their nation's freedom…
"Bush officials are looking for clues that will allow them to prevail over a stubborn insurgency, or failing that, find a viable exit strategy. But there do not appear to be many useful lessons in Horne's book for Bush except 'don't.'"
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