History: First Draft

Tom Paine used to be my favorite internet outpost, but their redesign a few years back turned me off, and the burgeoning blogosphere (god help me) absorbed my surf time. As a result, I missed this from Russ Baker. I found it on Dave Neiwert's invaluable Orcinus, and it really seems to me to be the most revealing thing I've read about Bush in a long time. It's not surprising - almost obvious, really - but it's a reliable source (Bush's pre-2000 speechwriter), and it has a lot of explanatory power. I daresay that, in 50 years, it will be the conventional wisdom about Bush and Iraq:

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade . . . .if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."

I mean, just read that final clause. What more affirmation could a serial failure like W want?