Former President George W. Bush signaled on Thursday that he sees not privatizing Social Security as his greatest failure from the eight years he served in the White House, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The unpopular Republican leader made the suggestion while speaking at a trade conference in the Windy City, where he discussed his legacy and also offered a glimpse into what readers can expect from his forthcoming memoir, Decision Points.
More after the bump...
"I would like to be remembered as a guy who had a set of priorities, and was willing to live by those priorities," explained Bush. "In terms of accomplishments, my biggest accomplishment is that I kept the country safe amidst a real danger."
Excuse me? He thinks his biggest failure is not privatizing social security? Imagine where your money would be today if it had been in the stock market as he and Republicans would have liked it to be? When will these people wake up?
His biggest failure is NOT keeping the country safe. It was on HIS WATCH, during a time where he had a LOT of evidence (more so than any other President, that we would be attacked) that 9/11 happened. He had been in office a FULL 8 months when it happened, not just days as he and others imply.
His second biggest failure was going to Afghanistan and especially Iraq, poking our arm in that beehive that we will never really get out of.
That's not to mention helping to create the worst recession since the Great Depression during HIS WATCH! In fact, if you listen to his own words, it's not a 'recession' we went into, it was another 'depression'.
Most people think we have been in a 'recession', not a 'depression', there's a big difference.
President Obama, the Democrats and even the Republicans have pointed out several times over the past two years that this was the worst recession since the great depression and the bailout kept it from being another Great Depression.
According to the Bush administration, Obama has it wrong. It could have been a GREATER DEPRESSION than the GREAT DEPRESSION.
During his speech to a Chicago group on Friday Bush said this:
When a member of the audience asked why he had signed off on the bailout of major financial institutions, Bush said he took that action after his economic advisors, Henry Paulson, the former treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the current head of the Federal Reserve, urged him to do so.
"I did not want to be a president overseeing a depression greater than the Great Depression," Bush said.
In other words folks, Obama and the Democratic Party didn't just help save us from another Great Depression, they saved us from an even GREATER Great Depression!
And George W Bush along with his Republican Party created a Depression that could have been GREATER than the Great Depression....under THEIR WATCH!