History Will View George W. Bush Badly
With only two months remaining in the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush's service in the White House, historians are already gathering material to write about his legacy. The president's aides claim he is serene, confident that he will get a better shake in the history books despite his dismal standing in the polls as he leaves office.
He is wrong.
Bush arrived in the capital in 2001, vowing to run the government as a "compassionate conservative."
And he said he would unify, not divide, the country and Washington. He based his claim on his record as governor of Texas. But unifying is a job far easier in Austin than in Washington.
The compassion did not last long. Bush moved quickly to the right on taxes, the environment, and energy, to name a few key issues. He reached across the aisle on education on his No Child Left Behind but wound up leaving it with insufficient money. Compromising with Democrats was not his way of operating with Congress.
His going to war in Iraq before the job was finished in Afghanistan led to a huge divide in the country. It still exists today, and he leaves a huge mess in the region.
Further, Bush allowed himself to stand by as a spectator while Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies tore up any restraints on the executive branch. In their excellent books, Barton Gellman in Angler and Jane Mayer in Dark Side, the two authors showed a brazen Cheney taking over such issues as intelligence and torture. Bush's primary role was to affix his signature.
Cheney et al. were helped by a Justice Department headed by Bush's pal from Texas, Alberto Gonzales, who will go down in history as one of our worst attorneys general. Even young conservative lawyers in the administration were shocked by how Bush allowed himself to be manipulated by the secretive vice president.
Although Bush lost the popular vote and was elected only by a controversial ballot count in Florida, Cheney scoffed at the suggestion that the new administration did not have a mandate.
Today, some Republicans have the gall to deny Obama has a mandate, although he was elected by a sizable margin in both the popular and electoral counts.
In the presidential campaign, Bush and Cheney were shunned by GOP candidates from sea to shining sea. Some even avoided the word Republican in their advertising lest they be branded with the president and his wrecking crew.
On November 4, President-elect Barack Obama won easily, in large part because Sen. John McCain had the Bush record around his neck. The GOP nominee tried to separate himself on some issues, but few listened.
The president is talking about writing his memoirs when he returns to Dallas and the ranch at Crawford. Some publisher will doubtless offer big bucks. I will not read it because it will surely be a narrative blatantly full of spin.
It is going to take some time to undo the damage the president and his vice president have done to our nation.
Michael Gerson, Bush's former speechwriter and now an op-ed writer in the Washington Post, said after the GOP shellacking last week that his former boss was a man of decency. Bush's father, the nation's 41st president, was a man of real decency.
His son came up short.
Reader Comments
History Will View George W. Bush Badly
Mashek is confident of his prediction because he believes that the Left controls much of academia. Therefore, they can write the "correct" version of history. This is like the old Soviet Encyclopedia in which a person's place in history could change in an instant. History instead will view this generation of Liberal Fascists as the usurpers of truth. Pure malevolence like this hasn't existed since the "glory days" of Goebbels.
Talk about spin...
Mashek says he will not read Bush's memoirs because they will be full of spin. Ha! The spin is the incredible hatred the Democrats and their puppets in the media have dumped on President Bush and the American people these past eight years.
The atrocities of 9/11 were the direct result of the Clinton administration ignoring the entire series of attacks on America through the 1990s. They started with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and ending with the attacks of 9/11, 2001.
The Bush tax rate reductions stimulated the economy after Clinton's recession and 9/11 attacks, resulted in record tax revenues, and the highest earners paying a larger portion of taxes than before.
The current financial crisis is the direct result of Democrat driven meddling in markets with legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act. The liberals used regulations, government coercion, to force lenders to make mortgage loans to "underprivileged" borrowers. We know how that turned out and now Obama and the same bunch of crooks including Schumer, Frank, and Dodd, want to do more of the same sort of meddling.
The bottom line is that people like Mashek, the Democrats, and the rest of the Bush-hating media cabal have lied to the American people these past eight years to gain political power, increase the scope of government, and make more people dependent on their handouts.
It has worked like a charm...lemmings.
Triumph of avarice due to the idolatry of the fruits of greed
A culture that defines its very raison d'etre by endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources, demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.
Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?
Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs...... all signatures of success in a culture borne of the 'goodness' of greed?
Consider for a moment what greed has wrought.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176
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