By now George W. Bush's legacy as one of the worst Presidents in United States history is relatively secure. Warren G. Harding. Ulysses S. Grant. And then the competition starts to get a little thin. Maybe Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, or Rutherford B. Hayes. I mean, even Hoover and Nixon look good by comparison!
Not only was Dubya caught with his pants down on September 11th, 2001 (after first setting in motion the greatest transfer of wealth from working people to the obscenely rich in the history of the world), but the policies of his administration in the aftermath of those attacks have been both cynically self-serving and singularly ineffective. Osama bin Laden is still at large, while the war to change the regime in Iraq and rid Saddam of his imaginary weapons of mass destruction has simply led to the proliferation of nuclear technology to other "rogue nations," while at the same time creating a "new front in the War on Terror" which has tied down our military in a no-win civil war between irreconcilable religious fanatics, while at the same time making American soldiers easier targets for terrorist insurgents of every ideology. Secret overseas prisons, government-sanctioned torture, the dismemberment of the Bill of Rights: when you actually step back and take a good, hard look at what is really happening, the reality is MUCH worse than the partisan political rhetoric.
Stocks (and Oil Prices) are at record highs, but real wages are stagnant and a collapsing housing market threatens to rob many middle class Americans of their only real source of financial security. And then of course there was Katrina. But the real travesty of the Bush administration has been its utter disregard for the problem of Global Warming, and its refusal to take seriously our nation's dominate role in the creation of that problem. Our children and our children's children have far more to fear from out of control climate change than they do a terrorist attack. Yet if controlling carbon emissions threatens to cut into oil company profits, the idea might as well be dead on arrival.
The Bushies stole an election in Florida in 2000 to come to office in the first place. This is not just my opinion; it is an objective, historical fact. They quite likely stole another (in Ohio, in 2004) in order to maintain their grip on power. We know that they will lie; we know that they will suppress voter turnout; we know that they are willing to race-bait, gay-bash, appeal to religious prejudice and spend massive amounts of money in order to polarize our nation through fear-mongering and jingoism and maintain their places of wealth and privilege. And it really does need to end. Soon. Like next Tuesday. Rome wasn't built in a day. But the Roman Republic collapsed in less than a generation, to be replaced by a brutal system of autocratic, authoritarian government in which a handful of unimaginably wealthy individuals dominated the known world, and treated its entire population as their slaves. Don't be distracted by Bread and Circuses. Regime Change truly does begin at home.
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Not only that, but he also rounded up American citizens and threw them into concentration camps just because of the color of their skin, using "National Security" as an excuse... suspended habeus corpus even for American citizens accused of aiding the enemy... tried to deal with the economy by creating a fascist state, and when the Supreme Court overturned it, he tried to break the court! No, wait, that was Roosevelt. No, he started a foreign war in a country that had no American interests and cost tens of thousands of American lives, and let it drag on for years as he personally directed troops and poisoned the victim nation with carcenogenic defoilients... he directed the FBI to wiretap and infiltrate reporters and student groups who protested against him, even to the extent of trying to get pop stars deported for being communists! No, wait, that was LBJ. Now I've got it- he's the president who submitted the Kyoto Global Warming Accords to Congress, but quietly let it be known that he opposed it- and got the 95-0 vote against it that he wanted. No, wait, that was Clinton. Hmm... oh, yes, he was the president who stole an election- the voting machines with the REAL totals were dredged up years later in Lake Michigan while doing routine beach maintenance. No, wait, that was Kennedy. Sometimes it's hard trying to figure out the angels from the devils...
Ah yes, "that man" FDR. Sometimes it seems to me too that rolling back the New Deal is the ultimate objective of this whole neo-con job. But let's face facts. No responsible academic historian is EVER going to include FDR on a list of America's worst Presidents. Not even Newt -- even if his cronies do succeed in their mission to replace Roosevelt's face on the dime with that of America's most senile President, Ronnie Ray-Gun....
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