George W. Bush: A Not so Fond Farewell

As President George W. Bush at long last takes his leave, he seeks to re-write the history of his disastrous presidency and to conjure up accomplishments in the empty spaces where these should lie. The President insists he should receive the most credit for protecting America, for keeping it safe against those who would do it harm.

Unfortunately, he fell short here as elsewhere, for the greatest threat to our nation’s well-being was not a two-bit terrorist like bin-Laden, nor a two-bit dictator like Saddam, but rather the President himself. At the end of the day, as they like to say on Wall Street – where now it is truly once and for all the end of the day – the greatest threat to America was the Bush Administration. In his eight uncertain years at the helm, the Bush regime managed to inflict more damage upon our country -- politically, socially, economically – than any foreign adversary could have hoped to achieve. It will no doubt be a generation or more before we can even calculate the full extent of the devastation.

Hiding behind the American flag, brandishing the politics of fear like some sort of prehistoric club upon an uncertain population, Bush and his unlikely team of right-wingers, evangelical Bible-thumpers, recidivist southern racists, anti-science kooks and charlatans, xenophobes and fringe loony-tunes formed a surprising alliance with wealthy Americans on Wall Street and dirt poor folks on Tobacco Road. This was to be the only true accomplishment of the Bush Administration, to – eerily similar to the defunct communist parties of the 20th century – achieve and maintain power, for better or worse.

And for us, it was to be the worse.

It was not just that the ideology he stood upon was a wobbly platform that was no less than an anathema to American ideals, but more critically that he wielded his authority with such consistent incompetence that he failed to deliver anything substantive even for those he purported to represent. And let us not forget the lives – thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives – that fell victim to his shaky hand on the wheel. Our collision with the twin menaces of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan more than sixty years ago made us a stronger nation in the end. We went up against far more feeble opponents this time around in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it is we who have come out the weaker.

I remain puzzled by the 22% of Americans who retain support for George W. Bush and claim to miss him when he goes. This is much like a recovered cancer patient who has nostalgia for the excised malignancy. Instead, those of us who have survived partially intact from eight years of the Bush Presidency should look ahead, certain in our conviction that whatever obstacles and pain may lie over the horizon, nothing can exceed the horror that was our recent past.