Posted 4/20/2006 05:18:00 PM by Douglas

Every president must be concerned, on some level, about their legacy. It's obvious That Bush 43 still thinks he can make up his own.

While White House press secretary Scott McClellan resigns, Rumsfeld stays. Clinging to Rumsfeld as indispensable to his strength, Bush reveals his fragility. The two men prefer not to understand that time and opportunity lost can never be regained. Their denial extends beyond the realities of Iraq and its history to the history of the United States. It is extremely peculiar that they have learned no lessons of nation building from the tragedy of failed political leadership during post-Civil War Reconstruction, whose collapse consigned African-Americans to second-class citizenship for a century. Bush & Co. disdain nation building as something soft and weak connected to the Clinton presidency, just as they belittled and neglected terrorism as a Clinton obsession before Sept. 11 and as the president dismissed history itself as weightless.

"History? We don't know. We'll all be dead," Bush remarked in 2003. "We cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. The living president has already sealed his reputation in history.

What will the eight Bush years be remembered for, other than seven years of a protracted land war in Asia? Hubris.