*Former President George W. Bush has been sitting for interviews as part of the publicity rollout for his book, 41: A Portrait of My Father. It’s an overdue paean to former President George H.W. Bush. George W., the 43rd president, has been mentioning lessons he has learned from his dad, a war hero from World War II as well as Bill Clinton’s predecessor.
Alas, “W” never learned the most important lesson available: that you don’t want to “own” Iraq by invading it, occupying Baghdad and ousting Saddam Hussein. As we know, the laws of unintended religious and tribal consequences inevitably kicked in. Iraq was more of a European colonial construct than country. But “W” listened to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not his father. And America continues to pay the price.
No too-late-in-life shout-out to his father can change that.
* Nice touch the other night at the St. Pete campus of USF where the Poynter Institute sponsored a tribute to two long-time media stalwarts who will soon retire. News anchors John Wilson, who will step down next week at Fox 13, and Gayle Sierens, who will retire from News Channel 8 next spring, were honored for their competence, professionalism, Emmy Awards and local involvement.
Yes, theirs is still a “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” medium, but both proved the best can rise above it. Wilson and Sierens underscored that they worked in a community–not just a market.
Reginald Roundtree, the WTSP-Ch. 10 anchor, emceed the event and rendered the ultimate peer accolade. “I think the bay area has been made a better place because of both of you,” said Roundtree.
How true. How rare.
* Daniel Drezner, a Tufts University professor of international politics and a Brookings Institution senior fellow, recently referenced the Rays in a Washington Post column. He characterized President Barack Obama as “the Tampa Bay Rays of presidents.”
In effect, his analogy was saying that good work–from playing winning baseball in front of small crowds to doing a “pretty good job of shepherding the country through the Great Recression” amid anti-Obama vitriol–has gone largely underappreciated (by fans/voters).
* The Mormon church is getting some props for coming clean on details about its founder, Joseph Smith. It’s part of a general pattern we’ve been seeing among religions to foster greater transparency, with the consequent hope of promoting more contemporary appeal.
We all get transparency, of course. But it also can be the sharpest of double-edged swords. In this case, do you get enough non-opaque credit to offset the revelation that confirms your founder’s three dozen-plus wives, including at least one as young as 14? Frankly, that’s transparently shameful, whatever the context.