1115.org

With the G8 summit getting under way even as the echoes of Putin’s recent saber-rattling are still reverberating, Bush’s famous remark about looking Putin in the eye, and plumbing his soul, and liking what he saw, has been getting a lot of play.

This is, of course, just another case of this much misunderstood man (Bush, not Putin) being misunderstood.

I’ll grant at the outset that it’s easy to see this now, with the benefit of hindsight. It may not have been quite so easy back in the pre-9/11 world of June 2001.

But the fact of the matter is that Bush’s statement was just mistakenly assumed to be a statement about Putin (namely, that Putin was a good guy).

It was actually Bush, in a strangely conflicted confessional-bragging moment, telling us who he really is (namely, a soulmate of the devil).

It was a ruddy cry for help. He was asking for help in the only way he knew — so elliptically that no one was able to figure it out till it was way too late.

But Bush’s message was so straightforward. All he was saying was: “Give peace a chance!”

Okay, maybe not. That was just me checking if you’re really paying attention. Since you are, all Bush was saying was: “Everyone knows exactly who and what Putin is. Well, hear this now: I’m his soulmate!”

What he really meant was: “Will no one stop me before it’s too late?”

History will record that no one could or did.

And so the 9/11 attacks were allowed to happen.

More than 600,000 Iraqis were killed.

What used to be our international standing, our prestige in the community of nations, was ground into the dust.

Constitutional rights and sacred civil liberties were casually abrogated.

We repudiated not just the Geneva Conventions, but our own national character.

And all because no one understood that Bush was saying: “Save me from myself! Save America from me!”