Landing On Water

It seems nothing short of poetic justice that the pilots of USAirways Flight 1549 were able to avoid an air disaster in New York City by landing on the Hudson River and save everyone on board on the same day George Walker Bush - who uses the aviation disaster of September 11, 2001 to define his Presidency as a success - gave his farewell address, overshadowing the thirteen-minute speech entirely. Bush's address exaggerated his accomplishments in Afghanistan and alluded to success in building a stable democracy in Iraq that haven't actually happened yet.

He boasted about a foreign policy that promotes equal rights for women in the rest of the world - forget for a moment the abortion gag rule - even as he's appointed judges that have been whittling away at women's rights. He sidestepped the torture issue - even as prospective Attorney General Eric Holder came right out and declared that waterboarding is torture and vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay facility. And so on, and so on, until you had to do a double take when you realize he took pride in appointing the insufferable John Roberts - who has the unpleasant (for him) task of administering the presidential oath of office for the first time in his role as Chief Justice to Barack Obama on Tuesday - and the even more insufferable Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Bush's "speech" was essentially a delusional laundry list of inflated deeds and slightly more inflated rhetoric, delivered in the White House to a bunch of invited guests - Cabinet officers, relatives, and other sycophants - for live responses. (What is this, a sitcom episode?) Gone was the dignity of speaking alone from the Oval Office, with the kind of stirring Reaganesque rhetoric about a shining city on a hill, nor a word of warning about the future, as Eisenhower and Clinton offered. (Even Cheney offered a warning - threatening though it was - during his chat with Jim Lehrer.) It wasn't a speech, it was a plea bargain for a favorable view from historians.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.