Rough draft of history

And it's pretty fuckin' rough. Bush's least repulsive surrogates, his wife and Condi Rice, have been out trying to lay the groundwork for the rehabilitation of his reputation, but something like this -- fourteen pages of the man's every failure and inadequacy -- laid out in a prestigious magazine is devastating, particularly at this point in time, when the question of where Bush fits in the presidential pecking order is becoming an issue. The format of it -- quotations from people who knew him and worked with him, many of them Republicans -- is designed to appeal to a Washington culture that is conditioned to dismiss any criticism of the right as "partisanship." Won't be so easy with this piece, and the events it covers, and the descriptions of them, are vivid, just the sort of things that our dullard press corps will remember when they need to fall back on a narrative to tell a story they are too lazy and brainless to write themselves. The really sad thing is it takes something like this to make one sure Bush will get the reputation he deserves -- his actions themselves, with a corrupt and lazy press corps like ours, weren't enough.