What to Make of George?

Now that W is almost toast, I find myself wondering what to make of him, how to capture what he has meant for me and this country as I see it. Consider this a work in progress as the dark days of his reign wind down.

He has so many faces, from the playful frat house smart ass to the devout, born again crusader against a woman's right to choose, the teaching of evolution, and gay marriage; from the resolute commander in chief in military drag (ironic since, as a young man, he avoided serving in the military) to the buffoon deliberately garbling words and sentences. Which of these will loom largest in my memory of him?

And although he's gotta be one of the worst presidents in history, still, in the past couple of weeks he has actually made some good efforts as George Packer notes:

He strengthened sanctions on Sudanese companies and officials in response to the ongoing massacres in Darfur. He called on Congress to double the funding for global AIDS programs, to thirty billion dollars. He directed his envoy in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to sit down with his Iranian counterpart and discuss ways of stabilizing Iraq—the most high-profile meeting between top officials of the two countries in years. And he attacked the demagoguery of right-wing critics of the bipartisan immigration bill.

Still, as Packer continues: "Bush's legacy will be the war in Iraq and, secondarily, the array of decisions on prisoners, alliances, treaties, and preventive war which revolutionized American foreign policy after September 11th."

I know that, like myself, George is complex, a mixture of the savage and the noble, of ignorance and brilliance, good and evil. And it is wrong to overlook that complexity, seeing him in black and white terms, reducing him to either good or evil. And it's possible that in the months ahead I will see him for the human congeries that he is.

But as of this moment, I see him as a man culpably ignorant and blinded by arrogance, an insecure man who brooks no dissent, whose shock and awe tactics have unleashed great suffering on hundreds of thousands, and whose legacy we Americans will be trying for generations to overcome.

Note: Just a day or so after I wrote the above words, W, true to form, subverted the legal process and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence. Looks like my last paragraph stands. Is there no end to this guy's arrogance?