President Bush is working on his image. He's touring the talk shows talking up his record of accomplishment. And what a record it is. Hardly a citizen in this nation is left untouched by eight years of the Bush administration. But the president is going about his legacy project all wrong. He's ignoring the genuine accomplishments of his reign.
Take the way he touts his success in liberating Iraq from tyranny. All that does is remind us of the three trillion dollar cost, of the over 34,300 US killed and wounded, of the 100,000 to one million Iraqi casualties (nobody's counting), of the four million Iraqi refugees. To the extent the Iraqis have a government at all now, theirs is the third most corrupt in the world according to Transparency International, right after Somalia and Myanmar. Ethnic and religious divisions threaten to tear the place apart at any time, electricity and clean water are luxuries, and the rubble is everywhere. Dozens still die each week in bombings and assassinations.
Yet the one tangible result of the Iraq invasion is unmentioned by the Bush legacy burnishers. In destroying the Saddam regime and laying waste to his country, we have given the Iraqis the opportunity to start over, from scratch. It was a terrible place before we arrived, hopelessly in thrall to murderous and sadistic leaders. Now we've cleaned the slate for the Iraqis, allowing them to remake themselves entirely. If they are not seizing this historic opportunity with both hands, it's hardly Mr. Bush's fault.
Here at home Mr. Bush wants us to admire his economic program. Deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, the abolition of government oversight over business and finance. On the surface, this would appear not to have worked too well. From solid growth and low unemployment we've got economic contraction, millions out of work, bankruptcies, foreclosures, and ruin all around us. Entire industries are near collapse, the banking system is in shambles, and our economic rot has spread around the world, destroying prosperity like a deadly fungus. Even mighty corporate CEOs are traveling by sedan instead of private jet. Just in time for the Christmas buying season, Mr. Bush's policies have made us broke.
But therein lies the genius of the man. Did we really need that fancy ranch-style split level, that new car, the big flat screen TV? Rampant consumerism was making us shallow and grasping. Why waste money on a college education when all we need to know is in the bible? Why splurge on medicine and costly operations when we're all going to die anyway? The Bush economic collapse, the Great Debushion, has chastened the nation. It has transformed us from greedy consumers into spiritual ascetics. We can't afford to be anything else. The scourge of Crawford has whipped us into a higher state of consciousness, where material things no longer matter. All our vain pursuits, from the seeking of knowledge to the making of money, will have to be abandoned in favor of the contemplation of the infinite. It's healthy, it's godly, and though it may not be any fun, it makes for one hell of a cheap date.