Diatribune

Well, once again the Bush administration has hit the bottom. It has been revealed that a bunch of Bushies are now engaged in a fight over who should get CREDIT for George W. Bush’s word choices. (continued)

Bush's Muse Stands Accused
Speeches Weren't His, Colleague Says

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 11, 2007; Page A01

He has been hailed as the best White House speechwriter since Kennedy's Theodore Sorensen, the muse behind President Bush's most famous phrases, the moral conscience of the West Wing. But now Michael J. Gerson is accused by a former colleague of taking credit for words he did not write.

According to Matthew Scully, who worked with him for five years, Gerson is not the bard of Bushworld but rather a "self-publicizing" glory hog guilty of "foolish vanity," "sheer pettiness" and "credit hounding." In Scully's account, Gerson did not come up with the language that made him famous. "Few lines of note were written by Mike," Scully says, "and none at all that come to mind from the post-9/11 addresses -- not even 'axis of evil...' "

Scully says (Gerson’s image as a master of Bush’s presidential eloquence is) an image puffed up by an unrelenting talent for self-promotion that ignored the contributions of two fellow speechwriters, Scully and John McConnell...

Who do we believe, in a situation like this? I just don’t know who I can trust in the Bush administration anymore when something like this happens. We are reduced to guessing who can take credit for some of the President’s most astonishing rhetorical flourishes.

“Is our children learning?”
Who, on the Bush team, came up with that one? I don’t see anyone coming forward and grabbing the laurels for that. My guess: Gerson. The timeline tells the story here; Gerson was there at the beginning, when Bush dropped that particular ‘bon mot.’

"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease." —Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14, 2001
A foreign policy observation. I say it was Scully who came up that one; it was either Scully or Mulder.

“Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties." —discussing the Iraq war with Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, as quoted by Robertson.
Any guesses who wrote that? No one’s stepping forward to take credit for it, that’s for sure.

"Do you have blacks, too?" —to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2001
More foreign policy. An incisive quest for information, that’s got to be the work of Scully and McConnell.

"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." —on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005.
Well, they wrote a multi-part series about how it could happen in the New Orleans Times-Picayune long before it happened, and “Brownie” Brown is on tape telling Bush it was going to happen before it did. I say Gerson came up with that. It’s short, pithy, and it’s absolute bullshit—all the hallmarks of Gerson, there.

"I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace." —Washington, D.C. June 18, 2002
I think George Orwell came up with that one.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." —May 1, 2003
This one was probably a genuine group effort, like the “Mission Accomplished” banner that they’re Photo-shopping out of the pictures now.

And who came up with this one, which is to me still the essence of the man?
Three months after the 9/11 attacks in which thousands of Americans died after he failed to act on warnings of an imminent Al Qaeda strike on the U.S.:
"But all in all, it's been a fabulous year for Laura and me." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Dec. 20, 2001

I guess we’ll never know who came up with that unforgettable assessment. But this I do know, and I want it on the record—it was I who came up with the phrase “axis of idiots” to describe these guys.

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Bill Prendergast is also a contributor to Dump Michele Bachmann.