After clearing up the weapons of mass destruction issue, Bush went on to quickly dispose of the outing of CIA weapons intelligence specialist Valerie Plame as an angry neocon reprisal against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, launched by stalwarts Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Robert Novak. Outed CIA specialists had been killed in the past.
To Bush the Valerie Plame incident was no more than a misunderstanding. While he resisted Cheney's effort to have him pardon Libby, there were no hard feelings in the final analysis.
He called Cheney a "good soldier," the same person who maximized his college deferments and finally impregnated his wife to avoid serving a cause in Vietnam that he verbally championed. Then again, Bush's powerful father got him a coveted post in the Texas National Guard, from which he eventually bolted.
The most interesting and in many ways the most revealing expression of Bush's hubris was his disclosure of what he viewed as the "worst moment" of his presidency. It occurred when African American rapper, singer, and record producer Kanye West called him a racist for perceived indifference to Hurricane Katrina.
Here was someone who launched the Iraq War and, at the time the first bombs were falling on Baghdad, pumped a clenched fist into the air and exclaimed, "Feels good!"
Bush was also in office when 9/11 occurred, resulting in tragic loss of American life. He could justify repeated violations of civil liberties at home and flouting of laws abroad through waterboarding and rendition by citing the tragedies of 9/11, but at the end of the day an inarticulate and brash rapper's accusation represented the worst moment of his eight years in the Oval Office.
Winston Churchill was Britain's prime minister during World War Two. He personally witnessed wholesale destruction of the land he loved and was a major architect of war strategy in a conflict that resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths.
Could anyone imagine Churchill, after his days as prime minister had ended, telling an interviewer that the worst moments of his premiership were the names that his bitter enemy Lady Astor called him?
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