People keep asking me what do I think of Barack Obama, now that he is going to be President come January 20th, 2009. Which I'll admit a kind of devious joy in answering them since I didn't vote for either Obama or John McCain (in keeping with my policy of
never voting for anyone who runs a single negative ad, neither one of 'em deserved my vote). Whenever anyone's asked me that in the past few weeks my answer has been the same: that I can't see Obama being a good President at all... but as bad as he would have been on his own, he will be even worse because George W. Bush paved the way first.
It will be decades before we fully understand the damage that Bush has done to this country, and consequently to this world. Yet Bush is so self-deluded with grandeur that he seriously expects historians to not just forgive him, but to exalt him. From the article at Breitbart...
George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends."I'd like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush said in excerpts of a recent interview released by the White House Friday.
"I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values."
He also said he wanted to be seen as a president who helped individuals, "that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package."
Well, it's true that he didn't compromise his "values". All his life, George W. Bush has valued George W. Bush and no other... and to that he has certainly been faithful. Too bad that he never comprehended the fact that he wasn't trusted to be "the Decider" or even "the Leader" but instead was sent to Washington, as are all elected officials, to be a
servant. Lo and behold, as
Fred Reed eloquently observed two years ago: "We are ruled by a male cheerleader who favors torture."
The crux of Bush's argument is that he will be seen as a "liberator". That he would insist his lack of wisdom is wisdom itself would be laughable, were it not for the fact that in many aspects Iraq is worse off today than it was under Saddam Hussein. I have written here before and I will reiterate again: democracy is not, in and of itself, a good thing. For a nation to know success as a democracy, its people must first want to govern themselves, having understood the responsibilities that such a condition demands of them. There is no way that democracy can be "imposed" on a people and it be a lasting thing. Bush refuses to understand (or is incapable of understanding at all) that Iraq was never one united country to begin with. That it was fractious and poised to destroy itself, were it not for a "strongman", even one as reprehensible as Saddam Hussein, keeping it together and peaceful at the point of a gun. Now Saddam is gone and the United States has inherited the title of "Iraqi Strongman". That is a role that we should have never desired, and can not afford to sustain. And as soon as our military forces leave Iraq, it will - sooner or later - self-destruct. Bush broke it and we're having to buy it.
By the way, why is it that most Presidents in the past century or so have tried to make a name for themselves as "international peacemaker" when more often than not they fall flat on their faces? The last time that I can recall a President ever had real success as a peace mediator, it was Teddy Roosevelt when he brokered the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. Like this weird obsession with "peace in Israel": when the hell are we going to get a President who tells the Israelis and the Palestinians "you guys hash this out between yourselves, we don't have a dog in that hunt"? Probably when pigs fly. But I digress...
You wanna know where Bush most demonstrates that he hasn't a clue? It's when he brags about being a President who "...led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package."
Based on that bit alone, I cringe to think what sages of generations to come will judge of our era.
Georgie baby, none of those things are part of your job description! Not a single item that he brings up can be found in the Constitution of the United States. But then, since when has George W. Bush given a damn about the Constitution?
If he had been a smart man, Bush would have realized that we have to "get our own house in order" first, before we even begin to consider how to "help our neighbors".
So what is the state of the American house in the final days of the George W. Bush regime?
- Biggest expansion of government in American history- Creation of the Department of Homeland Security, regarded as the most wasteful government agency ever
- Doubled the national debt to more than $10 trillion and rising fast
- Budget surplus (which happened under Clinton, ironically) went from $236 billion to -$400 billion
- A loss of 3 million manufacturing jobs over the past eight years
- Value of the dollar has dropped by almost half
- Millions of illegal aliens that have flooded into the country... and nothing substantive done to stop the influx
- For the first time in American history, the United States went from being a food exporter to becoming a food importer (something that this country will not be able to survive in the long run)
- Wholesale diminishing of national defense: we now have no combat ready active duty reserves, and being tied up in two wars with no clear end goal has depleted our overall preparedness
- No Child Left Behind, which has destroyed more of our public education capacity than most politicians will ever admit
- Legislation like the New Freedoms Initiative which allows for forced medication of children against parental consent (read my thoughts about this from 2004)
- "Bailouts" of major companies at taxpayer expense... to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and perhaps as much as $7 trillion
- No more freedom from unwarranted search and seizure
- No more real right to petition for habeas corpus
- The most corrupt executive administration in the history of the United States (it even put the Clinton years to shame)
Bush has about fifty days left to wipe out his real record. But it won't happen. And even when Obama gets saddled with the mess, for this at least I suspect the American people will have a considerably
long memory.
I say again: however bad Obama might be, it will only be because George W. Bush set the precedent before him. May his name be forever condemned in history, as damned as those of Quisling and Pétain, remembered as a man whose vision would not exceed the boundaries of his own self-centered cranium... and as a result brought his own country to ruin.
William Sherman (shown at right), a reporter for the New York Daily News, engineered what must be one of the grandest thefts ever: the entire Empire State Building.
