William Rivers Pitt: Grand Old Parachutes

George W. Bush crawled out of the puckerbrush last week to deliver a speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, in which he took a poke at President Obama. "I told you I'm not going to criticize my successor," he said, before doing exactly that. "I'll just tell you that there are people at Gitmo that will kill American people at a drop of a hat and I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work. Therapy isn't going to cause terrorists to change their mind."

Ah, yes, the eloquence we've all missed so much since January. "I don't believe that persuasion isn't going to work" has to be tall in the running for first-ballot induction into the Gibberish Hall of Fame, and that quip about terrorists in therapy absolutely pegged the needle on the Irony Meter, as ABC News pointed out. "Interestingly," reported the network, "it was the Bush administration that sent some Gitmo detainees to a Saudi jihadi rehabilitation camp - called the "Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Centre for Care and Counseling. To decidedly mixed success."

Well, go figure. It wouldn't be vintage Bush without a few hearty dollops of mangled verbiage combined with maddening factual inconsistency, now, would it? It almost makes one nostalgic for the daily brain cramps our former president used to deliver with such gruesome consistency. Well, no, actually, not really.

In all likelihood, a day will come when the Republican Party will recover from the dazzling carnival of buffoonery, insanity and self-destruction it has become over the last three years, but that day has neither come nor looks to anytime soon. For the time being and until further notice, mostly because no new leader has stepped forward without sounding like an Appalachian snake-handler far gone on the still, the GOP is the party of George W. Bush. There's bad; there's worse; there's worst, and then there's that.

Greg Sargent, on his Washington Post blog, pointed out some data buried in a recent Wall Street Journal poll that must have every breathing Republican strategist grinding their teeth in despair:

The overall popularity of the Republican Party has now dropped below even the abysmal level of approval enjoyed by Dick Cheney. The poll found that 26% of respondents have a very positive or somewhat positive view of Cheney, up eight points from April. Meanwhile, it found that the GOP overall is viewed very or somewhat positively by only 25%, down four points from April. Okay, the difference is within the margin of error, making this a statistical tie. But still, this is pretty awful for the GOP, given that for a long time Cheney's historic unpopularity seemed to define a kind of low-water mark among Republicans.

There a couple of takeaways here. First, it appears that Cheney is doing a better job of making his own case than the current crop of GOP leaders are doing on behalf of the party as a whole, even though he's no longer in office. And second, it gives the lie to the notion that Cheney's ongoing media tour is helpful to the GOP overall, as some party leaders have publicly claimed to think. In reality, he only seems to be helping himself.

All is not lost in GOP Land, however. Those loyal Republicans bemoaning the current state of their party will be heartened to know that the people who personally detonated the GOP through rank incompetence, rampant avarice and lust for power are actually doing just fine, thank you very much.

Dick Cheney is shopping his memoirs around to publishers and asking for multi-millions in return, which some idiot will probably give him. Karl Rove just got a seven-figure deal to write his own Bush-era memoirs. Condi Rice just signed a three-book deal reportedly worth $2.5 million. Michael Mukasey, Tommy Thompson and Harriet Miers have all landed lucrative gigs at prestigious law firms, and Ari Fleischer somehow went to work for the Green Bay Packers.

Richard Armitage and Michael Hayden have landed on the board of directors for a pair of large defense contractors. Only Alberto Gonzales stands out as the lone Bush administration official unable to cash in on his time in government; his book deal was roundly rejected by publishers, and no law firm has seen fit to add his name to their roster. Can't imagine why.

And as for George W. Bush himself? Nothing less than $7 million for his memoirs, apparently to be titled "Decision Points," which will contain "a dozen of the most interesting and important decisions in the former President's personal and political life." Laura Bush has also inked a book deal for $3.5 million, meaning the former First Family will be getting more than $10 million to tell us what it was like to annihilate the Republican Party and grievously damage the country while eating off the best White House china.

The Republican Party is less popular than Dick Cheney, and Dick Cheney is about as popular as the shingles, but the folks who ran the GOP's train off the tracks and delivered the nation into this multifaceted mess are doing quite well in the aftermath. One is left to wonder how the people who voted for them feel about that. It's a damned safe bet they're not doing nearly as well as their erstwhile leaders are. Some might call that karma, but nobody should be surprised.

It's the George W. Bush Way, after all: I got mine, screw everyone else, amen.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.

ENDS

© Scoop Media