By John Wilkes from Eyesonobama.com:
Want to know what kind of President George W. Bush really was? Start with this simple question: could Dubya have gone to North Korea last week and freed the two American journalists held captive there?
Want to know what kind of President George W. Bush really was? Start with this simple question: could Dubya have gone to North Korea last week and freed the two American journalists held captive there?
OK, so international diplomacy wasn't really his thing.
But here, seven month's after Air Force Two carried he and he and his wife away from the White House for the last time, it's difficult to look back on the last eight Years and see any semblance of a positive legacy.
The economy is in shambles, and as much as anyone can try to pin it on the guy who just took office, it takes a long time to go from economic boom to slowed growth, to plateau, to contraction, to recession, to near-depression. And as easy as it is to blame the economic drop on heavy market deregulation and corporate greed, the problem is less what Bush did than what he didn't do.
The dot-com-bubble-burst was, in fact, inevitable. The economy simply couldn't expand by leaps and bounds every quarter. But the drop-off was forseeable. Had Bush used the $500 billion surplus created under the Clinton Administration to create a bevy of new jobs aimed at green technology instead of a massively expensive, minimally useful tax cut, it would have drastically eased the transition and spared countless thousands of people from joining the ranks of the unemployed. Or if he'd put pressure on the Big Four automakers to begin producing cars with higher fuel efficiency, it would have prevented or at least mitigated the precipitous drop in American car sales, just as Japanese automakers were reaping the benefits of producing more reliable cars.
And then there's Afghanistan. If Bush had acted sooner, rather than allowing Donald Rumsfeld to persistently pursue one of the most militarily ridiculous counter-insurgency strategies for upwards of two and a half years, our war to the north might never have spun so far out of control to the point it is now, when Taliban warlords have conquered cities within 25 miles of Kabul and the US is being forced to send thousands of additional soldiers to bring the situation under control.
If Republicans presided over the do-nothing Congress, Bush's was the do-nothing White House, even as the ship was taking on water at an alarming pace.
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