Tina Brown: Bush's endless 'debacles' made him 'punch drunk' David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: Wednesday November 19, 2008





Print This Email This As the last days of George W. Bush's presidency wind down, it is becoming clear that he expects to leave the urgent problems of his final months for the incoming Obama administration to sort out.



Tina Brown, editor of the journalism and celebrity gossip site, The Daily Beast, appeared on Tuesday's Rachel Maddow Show with guest host Alison Stewart to speculate about what might be going through Bush's mind.



"I do feel right now that he's very stunned," Brown suggested. "I think that the financial collapse was one debacle, one disaster that he honestly didn't anticipate. ... And so he has to recognize he's going out in a cloud of disaster. And I think that's really almost paralyzing him. I feel he's fading, he's becoming the invisible man as we look at him."



"At this point, Bush has had so many disasters on his watch," stated Brown, "that I honestly get the sense that this is not a president who's looking back in a mellow fashion on his presidency -- or even feeling that he has busy things to do -- so much as a president who's kind of punch-drunk, really, with a series of debacles which even he -- in his great sort of denial and his refusal to really accept his own failures -- has to accept at this point has been a, really a chapter of hideous accidents, if you want to be charitable about it."



"One of the things that I'm told at the moment," Brown noted, "is that Bush is entirely focused right now on his 'legacy.' ... All he really wants to talk about is his library, because he wants to build a legacy. But you know, quite honestly, one can only think of that library as almost like a Halloween house of horror ... from the Guantanamo room to the Abu Ghraib room to the Hurricane Katrina room."



Brown concluded by commenting with regard to Laura Bush's proposed memoirs that "Laura really wants to pop. Laura is fed up with being silent, and she will have things to say."



This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Nov. 18, 2008.









Download video via RawReplay.com







