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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Interviewing President Bush aboard Air Force One a few days before his second inauguration, a Washington Post reporter noted that American forces in Iraq had neither been welcomed as liberators nor found any of the promised weapons of mass destruction. "The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped," the reporter ventured. "Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?" The President's reply--as iconically Bushian as "Bring 'em on"--came to mind last Tuesday night as the big blue waves started rolling in. "Well," he said back then, "we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."
Actually, it was more like an impunity moment. "Let me put it to you this way," Bush had said the day after John Kerry's concession. "I earned capital in the campaign--political capital--and now I intend to spend it." And spend it he did. Whatever he had left over after he blew a wad trying to turn Social Security into a bonanza for the financial-services industry was squandered on an unending skein of assurances that the war in Iraq was...
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