President Bush's defenders are out beating the drum for his administration. Condie Rice says his foreign policy deserves an A+. Just consider, she says, all the people he liberated in Afghanistan and Iraq. To say nothing of the way he's helped with their population control issues. There's all the money he spent on AIDS in Africa. True the epidemic spread anyway, but that can't have had anything to do with the effective White House ban on US funded condom distribution. Then there's the way Bush called for a Palestinian state, no matter that the Middle East is poised to fall apart again. Laura Bush rejects the notion that her husband's presidency will be remembered as the worst in history. Someday, she avers, he'll be appreciated for the compassionately conservative shoe ducking natural athlete he really is. The ladies have a point. There's a lot to celebrate about the Bush presidency, even if many of its good features are apparent only to the discerning.
Detractors lay the world economic crisis at Bush's door. Inattention, an ideological cult of unfettered greed, and a federal government utterly at the service of corporate interests are all blamed. And while there is something to be said for this argument, consider that some people got very rich. Bernie Madoff. Dick Cheney with his Halliburton and Exxon stock. Ken Lay of Enron before he croaked. Even now, after the finance system collapse, bankers and insurers like Lloyd Blankfein, John Thain, Vikram Pandit, and Edward Liddy, CEOs respectively of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and AIG, are all raking in additional billions. Sure those are taxpayer supplied billions, but as any economist will tell you, money is fungible. So while millions may be out of work, have lost their homes, and are without health insurance, and though many more millions will likely soon join them, far from everybody has suffered in the Bush economy.
Bush partisans make much of the way the nation hasn't suffered another terrorist attack since 9/11. Of course the same cannot be said for Spain, Great Britain, France, India, Indonesia, Jordan, and other allies around the world. Indeed since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has risen. But that misses the point. During the Bush presidency there has not been a single earth-destroying meteor. We have not suffered any alien attacks that we know of. Godzilla, Frankenstein, and Dracula have all been in abeyance. Some paleontologists now say the dinosaurs might have been wiped out by cataclysmic volcanic eruptions that blanketed the entire world in killing lava and ash. Anyone noticed any of those during the last eight years? Let the record show that Bush has done a superb job on all these fronts.
Bush has encouraged the pollution of our air and water and abetted the poisoning of our food and drug pipelines, but that's just given hypochondriacs something real to be sick about. Our infrastructure may be crumbling from neglect, but think of the investment opportunities this creates for future generations. Veterans have been treated with appalling shabbiness, especially considering how the administration has used our troops as canon fodder around the world. But as Bush would be the first to point out, real men don't need housing, health care, and education. Speaking of which, Bush education policy has successfully dumbed the nation down, weakening an educational system that already lagged far behind the rest of the industrialized world.
But that too is all to the good. The next generation of Republicans has to come from somewhere.