W’s final press conference had one benefit that’s been overlooked in the coverage I’ve seen thus far: it gave us a reminder—a brief refresher, if you will—of how nasty and smug, and defensive, his tone has been for the past eight years. With little at stake and now fully off the leash and out of reach of his handlers, Bush ranted and playacted for 47 minutes yesterday in front of the press. He slumped from one side of the podium to the other in his classic faux-folksy posture while bouncing through the low-lights of his tenure in a sort of concentrate-thick performance of the defensive, hectoring style that became so familiar as the death toll mounted in Iraq, the disaster of Katrina unfolded, and the Constitution was shredded. His old-reliable strawman arguments were on display as he claimed that “the elite” and “the opiners” were the only ones who thought America’s moral standing had fallen in the world. It was vintage Bush—a revival of his greatest hits and a firm reminder that this was the worst president the country has ever seen and that he leaves even more clueless than when he arrived. So now he rides off into the Texas sunset, arrogantly believing that landing in the Oval Office somehow meant that he knew what he was doing there.
