Did Bush think of our soldiers as just pawns, just game pieces?

Did he not know that they were human beings?

To date, the US has lost 4,226 soldiers in Iraq. Another 638 in Afghanistan. Yet Bush has never attended the funeral of a single dead soldier, perhaps protecting himself from the reality of what he has unleashed.

The book, which is actually quite admiring of Bush (as were most press accounts in the 2001-2005 period), also includes this:

"He [Bush] has a very basic belief that if he does his part-gets the information, makes the choices-the results are somehow with God," says chief White House speech writer Michael Gerson. "He believes there's something broader going on. He does his best and the outcome is out of his control." This gives him a sense of peace and enables him to make decisions crisply and without anguish.

I suppose that if you think God is deciding the outcome, and God is good, then why worry yourself over decision making? Feel free to ignore pre-war intelligence reports, appoint Brownie to FEMA, let the deficit skyrocket, let Wall Street run wild, who cares?

And the book has plenty more tidbits:

He is not a voracious reader of books, managing to plow through one biography or historical volume every two or three weeks...

Although Karl Rove now claims that Bush reads at least one book per week, sometimes two. Yeah right.

As we learned quite starkly during Katrina, Bush has no interest in the news. But I never knew that he wanted his staff to ignore the news as well:

He has little interest in following the news day-to-day on TV. When he wanders into an Air Force One staff cabin and notices the news on a monitor, he will often frown and snap, "Turn that off."...He scans a few newspapers every morning but prefers to have his press staff summarize, orally or in writing, whatever he needs to know beyond his daily security and intelligence briefings. His favorite TV fare is major league baseball....

And of course, the guy is a grade A asshole. Imagine working for this guy:

Bush hates sitting still. Before landing, he has a habit of pacing impatiently in his airborne office or waiting just outside the door as the plane completes its taxiing (even though this violates air safety rules that require passengers to remain seated and strapped in until the aircraft comes to a complete stop). If the mobile staircase takes longer than he anticipates to roll up to the doorway, he will start complaining. "Let's go," he will say. "What's going on?"

This book has even more highlights, such as Bush's interest in cheesy military movies like Behind Enemy Lines, a 2002 religious service aboard Air Force One that was so over-the-top even Andy Card felt guilty talking about it, and a story about how he approved the creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security during a single flight without the need for any "exhaustive briefings or explanations". After all, creating a whole new government department, who needs to know the details anyway?

This is just one artifact from the Bush years, more proof that this bullying ignoramus had no business being the most powerful man on Earth. The evidence of his mediocrity was before our eyes for so long, yet it took America five traumatic years to really see it. Let's make sure this never happens again.