The Bush Presidency--Worst Ever

Recognizing that his tenure as President is close to over, we are hearing a lot recently from the President and his team, about his many accomplishments, and "solid record" of performance. It is important that anyone with a platform to do so, call out the President on his abysmal performance, and do it loudly, and immediately. So I will do my part to make sure that the people of America and the World get a complete picture of the worst President this nation has ever had.

The "many accomplishments" Bush and his team refer to are pathetic and sad. That they are being trotted out now, in the hopes that people will forget all the other miserable failures he has wrought on this nation, is a testament to a man who is living in a dream world.


Let's look at his accomplishments, shall we?

-Job Growth--His "52 months of uninterrupted growth" accomplishment is pathetic. Generating 3-4 million new jobs in 8 years sounds impressive. Until you compare it with Bill Clinton's record of helping to generate 20 million new jobs in the same 8 year time period, during the 1990's. For anyone who says that Presidents don't create jobs, I answer "I didn't bring this point up, Dubya did".

-"...I did pretty well, considering I inherited a recession...No one anticipated the Levees breaking. No one anticipated 9/11..."--Woe is me! It's not my fault. THINGS HAPPENED during my Presidency. If THINGS didn't happen, I could have been great! This kind of rationale is the kind of talk that small, unsuccessful people use, when explaining why they have never achieved much. "...if only..." So Kennedy never had to deal with a Cuban Missile Crisis? Carter could have been great, if not for the Hostages issue, or inflation? Nixon would have been a fantastic President, if not for forces out of his control, breaking the law?

-9/11--Honestly, has anyone ever done more to use a crisis to pad his own stats? Bush's record on this topic has been awful, other than trying to rally a nation who would have supported anyone sitting in the Presidents chair, for leadership. Bush politicized the event, to help the GOP increase power in the Legislature on the back of being the only party that could "keep America safe". Rather than try to allay, or calm fears, he used those fears to scare the Congress into passing the Patriot Act, push for warrantless wiretapping, and bully the country (and perhaps a few willing allies like England, Australia, and El Salvador) into a needless war in Iraq. That's not leadership. It's shameful.

And another thought on 9/11--I noticed that we talk a lot about how Bush reacted to 9/11, and how we haven't been attacked again. I don't hear much about why the administration didn't heed the concerns about the attacks coming, and do more to prevent them. Nor do I hear much about the fact that our interests are routinely attacked around the world, and there is less need to attack American soil, when terrorists can take their shots at Americans right there in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. Those attacks apparently don't count...

Now here's my list of Bush Accomplishments:

-Engaging us in a War with Iraq on the false pretenses that Saddam was linked to 9/11, was an imminent threat, or had weapons of mass destruction (take your pick. They were all wrong).

-Use of Alberto Gonzales as a tool, at first, for justifying things like the Patriot Act, Guantanamo detainees, and then later, as a political weapon at the justice department.

-Presiding over a tax policy that so favored the rich, that median wages actually DROPPED or remained stagnant for 8 years.

-Holding NO ONE accountable for Abu Gharib. Unbelievable.

-Showing spectacularly bad leadership on the Hurricane Katrina response. Not even leaving vacation for a two days AFTER the levees broke. The rest of the failures have been so public, there is no need to repeat them here, other than to note that a compliment of "heckuva good job, Brownie" was so disturbingly uninformed, and sad.

-Holding NO ONE accountable for the Valerie Plame leak. The commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence was so brazen, so one-sided.

-The destruction of the military through numerous tours of duty, stop-gap redeployments, degradation of equipment, and a failed strategy in Iraq, where we have now been for coming up on 6 full years. But hey, that was Rumsfeld's mistake, right?

-Claiming that only others had contributed to the atmosphere in Washington of Political partisanship? I will cite just one sound clip that Bush had, right before the 2006 Congressional elections. He claimed that "the party of FDR, had become the part of 'cut and run'" How is this anything but BUSH poisoning the atmosphere? To point to others for your misdeeds is the opposite of leadership. It is cowardice.

-Not recognizing the current recession for almost a year, and then basically sitting on the sidelines, hoping that Hank Paulson can figure it out? Again, this is not a leader. This is a man who puts others in charge, beholden to him, and then claims ignorance.

The last point may be the most important of all. For 8 years, we have not had a Commander in Chief. We have had a DELEGATOR in Chief. All leaders delegate, but successful leaders have two attributes that Bush does not. First, good leaders choose competent people who can achieve successful results. Second, leaders still hold themselves accountable for their teams results.

Bush has done neither of these things, putting party hacks, loyalists, and friends into positions of power, allowing his people to twist in the winds on their failures. Since America couldn't fire Bush, we fired his party in 2006 and 2008. I only hope that everyone understands that this man's actions over the past 8 years merit a judgement as the worst presidency ever, and any attempts by him to say otherwise, should be met with an offhand rejection.