What hath Bush wrought? In less than eight years, the indisputable winner of the title of worst president ever has an extraordinary list of un-accomplishments and disasters to look back on as he contemplates the book he will most surely have written in his name and what he will stock his presidential library with if and when SMU finally agrees to house it.
The man Karl Rove hid from us in 2000 as the "compassionate conservative" and the "uniter not a divider" has spent his two terms in office giving lie to both. The neocons who were behind his selection in the first place took the smirking, incurious, wise-ass, fratboy and wrapped him up in shiny new paper and pre-loaded him with aphorisms and generalities that were guaranteed to wow the Christian right wing of the party and yet not so over the top as to alienate the independents.
It can be strongly argued that not for the events of September 11, 2001, Bush would have been a failed one-term president. But like the deus ex machina in ancient Greek drama, the neocons were handed control over every branch of government of the country on a silver platter. Under the guise of tracking down bin Laden and his cohorts and the future security of the nation, the neocons seized the opportunity to implement every single aspect of their political agenda. Policy became the handmaiden of politics.
If the nineties was the era of free-wheeling wild exuberance on Wall Street where anything went and the sky was the limit, then the Bush era was its political equivalent. And both have come spiraling down to crash and burn. And while we will eventually manage to right the economy, we will never ever be able to right the egregious damage done to the lives of so many of our own young men and women who have served our country so valiantly. While we have lost some 4,200 of them in Bush's folly in Iraq, still close to 30,000 have returned home with their lives shattered both physically and mentally.
Nor do they come home to a better America, at least not for them. The medical treatment they desperately need is either in short supply of unavailable. The jobs they once had are gone and the prospect of finding new ones is nil. Some are forced to go on welfare while some are living on the street. And for those tens of thousands service men and women who will escape from the nightmare in Iraq, they will be asked to put their lives on the line once again in Afghanistan where the real battle against terrorism has always been.
Bush is also leaving us with a major American city still in ruins from Hurricane Katrina. He leaves us an America whose infrastructure of roads and bridges is literally crumbling before our eyes. He leaves us an economy that is not only in deep recession but teetering on the brink of depression. He leaves us the tattered remains of our Constitution which his minions have systematically dismantled. He leaves us an America where our rights of privacy have been thrown in the garbage. He leaves us a once proud and great country that has seen its reputation around the world destroyed. And he leaves us so much, much more.
Remember all this the next time you see him on TV over the next few weeks until January 20, 2009 and there he is smiling and joking and talking about how much money he hopes to make after he leaves office. Try really hard to comprehend how such an amoral, ignorant dullard rose to the highest office in the land. And then ask yourself how so many of us kept him there for eight long years.
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