Andrew Sullivan, amidst his regular shellacking of the Bush administration over torture, slips in the following:

Bush will rightly go down in history as the president who authorized the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody. But whether he has any self-awareness in this regard is worth asking. I wonder sometimes just how deep the crisis in American government was these past eight years. The entire system, in the end, rested on a man who wasn’t there.

I disagree: it absolutely is not worth asking. Whether he is truly morally bankrupt or merely staggeringly incompetent and/or out to lunch, it happened during his presidency and is therefore his responsibility. The actual workings of his murky mind should be of no concern to anyone. End of story.

The most important thing Bush’s stonewalling and denial tell us is that he is less politically astute than Ronald Reagan. Reagan, faced with a nasty scandal of his own, at least had the sense to symbolically and publicly accept the responsibility for it:

First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds — well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.

More cynical people like my parents at the time thought it was a cheap, sentimental tactic to have the president own up to his ignorance and plead for forgiveness with the American people, thereby insulating himself from the fallout. I’m sure Reaganites like Andrew were perfectly happy to take the president at his word.

But then as now, the actual mental state of the president is completely immaterial. Crimes were committed during both presidencies, and both presidencies are forever tarred in the history books. Good enough for me!