Hey Bush!

One of George’s lines has come back to haunt him. Thenews.pl reports.

Press reports claim that outgoing US president George W. Bush failed to contact any Polish politicians while bidding farewell to various heads of state at the end of his term of office.

President Bush made phone calls to leaders of the major global powers, writes the Dziennik newspaper, including Russian PM Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of France Nicolas Sarkozy.

The outgoing president also found time for a conversation with leaders of Denmark, Georgia and Greece.

But he apparently had no time for Poland’s politicians…

{…} In a presidential debate in 2004 with the then Democratic party contender John Kerry, - about the international nature of the coalition that invaded Iraq - the challenger said that the countries involved were only Great Britain, Australia and United States: “That’s not a grand coalition, we can do better," he said. Bush replied: “Actually, he forgot about Poland.”

It appears, this time, President Bush was the one who forgot about Poland.

Sss…boo…bah…sss…

Yup, much of the world has just breathed a sigh of relief. It’s over. Bush is finished.

The mistakes he made in his time went way, way beyond the linguistic, the grammatical. I just re-read Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, about Bush and the war in Iraq. It’s a much, much better book than Woodward’s first on the Bush presidency - Bush ar War - where his access to meetings of all the principles, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, was unparalleled. He was literally embedded into the regime. But with that closeness went Woodward’s critical distance. An awful book.

But State of Denial details the conflict and chaos within Bush’s administration as it ‘prepared’ for war brilliantly. Read it for all its shocking and awfulness.

The picture will stay always in my mind of how Woodward describes Bush sitting in the Oval Office listening to many people who knew that the US was about to make a terrible mistake and giving him detailed evidence of why this was so , and George looking as if he was concentrating as his little legs danced and jigged under the table.

Bush did things by instinct and he didn’t like it when someone was shattering his view that he must be, almost divinely in the right.

And now he has gone, off to his Texas ranch to set up a couple of Bush foundations and maybe even a library (with books full of words with no more than two symbols, natch...)!

But how will Obama approach Poland, America’s sometimes awkwardly over eager ally in Europe? Will Obama remember Poland?

He has a great chance to drop the anti-missile shield. Too expensive; maybe doesn’t even work; finance crisis, remember?

But nothing much is going to change as the US, Poland and all the others get bogged down ever deeper in Afghanistan. That will be. No change.

And I hope he doesn’t go, economically, down the protectionist route, like Democrats often do. That certainly won’t be in anyone’s interests.

But Poles generally don't share the huge expectations which now are going to weigh down on Barack’s shoulders, like they do in America, and maybe even in a European country like the UK, as well. Obama is a centre-right pragmatist, with a bright new shiney style. That’s it. He is movingly significant because of who he is - the first black president of the United States of America. But his politics? I think we should all calm down a bit.

And now Bush has gone, who are they gonna blame for all the other stuff he wasn’t responsible for? Maybe one day we are going to miss Old George. No more scapegoats.