Begone Bush  

The Economist has a look at George Bush's sorry legacy, noting "Few people will mourn the departure of the 43rd president" - The frat boy ships out. Even fewer will mourn the departure of Dick Cheney, with the lord of darkness recording a final 13% approval rating.

HE LEAVES the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”.

Few people would have predicted this litany of disasters when Mr Bush ran for the presidency in 2000. True, the 2000 election was likely to be divisive because of the peculiar arithmetic of the outcome (Mr Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 500,000 votes, then won a disputed recount in Florida by a few hundred). But for most people Mr Bush was a pretty acceptable choice, and certainly not a crusader-in-waiting.

He came across as an affable chap, particularly when compared with his uptight rival. Frank Bruni, who covered his election campaign for the New York Times, wrote in 2002 that “the Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster.” And the then governor of Texas presented himself as a centrist—a new kind of “compassionate conservative”, a “uniter rather than a divider”, an advocate of a “humble” and restrained foreign policy. The Economist liked this mixture enough to endorse him in 2000.

How did all this change? How did the uniter become a divider? How did Mr Bush’s governing style shape American politics over the next eight years? And what legacy has the 43rd president left for the 44th?

His supporters—the few that remain—point out that this was a presidency knocked sideways by the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, which no one foresaw. The huge expansion of government and executive power under Mr Bush, and the prosecution of a disastrous war, all unrolled in the wake of those attacks. The financial crisis, which began with overvalued homes and sloppily underwritten mortgages, was the product of numerous forces and failures in which Mr Bush was not a major contributor; they included low interest rates, bankers’ reckless risk-taking, flawed regulation and consumers’ bubble mentality, all of which spanned borders. ...

Relentless partisanship led to the politicisation of almost everything Mr Bush did. He used his first televised address to justify putting strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, and used the first veto of his presidency to prevent the expansion of that funding. He appointed two “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, turned his back on the Kyoto protocol, dismissed several international treaties, particularly the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, loosened regulations on firearms and campaigned against gay marriage. His energy policy was written by Mr Cheney with the help of a handful of cronies from the energy industry. His lacklustre attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, who was forced to resign in disgrace, was only the most visible of an army of over-promoted, ideologically vetted homunculi.

Bumbling towards Baghdad

The Iraq war was a case study of what happens when politicisation is mixed with incompetence. A long-standing convention holds that politics stops at the ocean’s edge. But Mr Bush and his inner circle labelled the Democrats “Defeaticrats” whenever they were reluctant to support extending the war from Afghanistan to Iraq. They manipulated intelligence to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and had close relations with al-Qaeda. This not only divided a country that had been brought together by September 11th; it also undermined popular support for what Mr Bush regarded as the central theme of his presidency, the war on terror.

Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, remarks how unusual it is for a president to have politicised such a national catastrophe: “No other president—Lincoln in the civil war, FDR in world war two, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the cold war—faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances, failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonised the Democrats.”

The invasion of Iraq was like much else in the Bush years—an initial triumph that contained the seeds of disaster. Thomas Ricks, the author of “Fiasco”, argues that “the US-led invasion was launched recklessly, with a flawed plan for war and a worse approach to occupation.” Mr Rumsfeld’s decision to invade with too few troops led inexorably to the breakdown of law and order, which turned the Iraqi population against the Americans, and to the Abu Ghraib scandal, which solidified world opinion against America. But Mr Bush responded to the unfolding disaster with a mixture of denial and stubbornness, refusing to force Mr Rumsfeld to adjust his plans. He engaged in an absurd photo-op to declare “Mission accomplished”, and he also gave medals to three of the architects of the debacle, George Tenet, Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer.

Mr Bush’s weaknesses were on display again in the second great disaster of his administration, Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005. The hurricane exposed Mr Bush’s congenital passivity: he did not visit New Orleans until five days later, after first viewing the damage from the safety of Air Force One. It also exposed the consequences of filling your administration with third-rate hacks. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, a former commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, made a hash of dealing with the disaster but nevertheless received an encomium from the president—“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”—that rang around the country.

How will Mr Bush be judged in the light of history? “Many historians”, says Princeton’s Mr Wilentz, “are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

Billmon has a look at how much money Dick Cheney made out of the Iraq war in "Worth It". Billmon also has a look at the likely disappearance from the public scene of Bush and Cheney forthwith, in "Flushing the Cheney Administration Down the Memory Hole".

Not too many years after the collapse of the Soviet state, I spent a couple of weeks in Moscow reporting on the rise of Russian capitalism -- or the system of organized corruption that then (as now) was passing for capitalism in the former workers paradise.

I quickly found that most Russians I interviewed didn't want to talk about the past. Some may have been afraid, or had something to hide (in a Stalinist police state, just about everyone eventually has something to hide); some may have found the memories too painful.

But I had the distinct impression that most of the people I met didn't want to talk about the former regime, its crimes or its downfall, because they didn't give a damn about it any more. They were too busy trying to survive (and/or get rich) in the social chaos the collapse of the system had left behind. The price of milk in the now tolerated (if not strictly legalized) private markets, the dollar-ruble exchange rate, the prospects for listing privatized (i.e. stolen) assets on the New York Stock Exhange -- these the topics that seemed to preoccupy people.

Likewise the "free" Russian press, which had long since worn out the novelty of glasnost and was busy figuring out how to make a buck filling a ravenous Russian hunger for infotainment -- an appetite every bit as big as its American counterpart. Gangsters and strippers, not democrats and dissidents, were on the cover of the New Russia.

There was, in other words, an informal cone of silence in effect -- motivated, I guess, by a tacit agreement that it was best not to pick at old wounds, or acknowledge divisive truths, out of fear that the battered national psyche (and national unity) might not be able to handle it.

This was not exactly a whopping big surprise -- it seems to be the way most societies cope, consciously or unconsciously, with the aftermath of a trip through the totalitarian funhouse (almost always funner going in than coming out). And, judging from the coverage of Commander Codpiece's last White House press conference, it also appears to be how the semi-official media in this country is going to cope with our own ugly brush with the dark side of the national security state.

But the difference -- or one of them, at least -- is that the old system here is still more or less intact, and has every intention of remaining that way right through the Obama era. Which means it has even less of an incentive to confront (much less investigate) nasty truths.

And so we get leads like this one, from one of our major "news" organizations (i.e. corporate conglomerates):

In his final news conference today, President Bush candidly reflected on the mistakes and milestones of his eight years in office, conceding he made some mistakes but forcefully defending some of his most controversial actions.

And here's a little sample of what ABC (or rather, Disney-Cap Cities-ABC) considers a "candid" defense of the administration's policies on Gitmo, the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture:

And in terms of the decisions that I had made to protect the homeland, I wouldn't worry about popularity. What I would worry about is the Constitution of the United States, and putting plans in place that makes it easier to find out what the enemy is thinking, because all these debates will matter not if there's another attack on the homeland.

Or FEMA's criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina:

People said, well, the federal response was slow. Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed . . . I Thirty thousand people were pulled off roofs right after the storm moved through. It's a pretty quick response.

Or the neocon dream team's willfully destructive approach to Middle East diplomacy (diplomacy as an act of sabotage):

Why haven't we achieved peace? That's a good question. It's been a long time since they've had peace in the Middle East.

To call this "candor" is either a baldfaced lie -- or an admission that you are completely incapable of recognizing the difference between a lie and a truth. And while ABC (like Bush himself) may only be guilty of the latter, not the former, the fact that this produces reporting that is functionally indistinguishable from a lie is telling. It shows just how far the system -- specificially, in this case, the Beltway political press -- has wandered from reality.

You can see this in just about all of the transition coverage. Reporters (like the ones responsible for the journalistic abomination above) and columnists and pundits are busy cranking out the usual lame duck legacy stories, as if this were the "normal" end of a "normal" presidency, instead of the concluding chapter of a national tragedy.

There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy -- to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all -- and how the story is being treated in the corporate media.

It's not quite Pravda -- at least some of the hard questions are being asked, if only half-heartedly -- but it still has some of the same barely concealed, everybody-knows-even-though-we-are-not-allowed-to-say quality of Soviet discourse in the USSR's terminal Potemkin Village phase. It's as if keeping up the pretense -- observing the customary rituals as handed down by the priests of High Broderism -- is all most of the press corpses know how to do any more, or care to do.

And, as in late Soviet times, the absurdity of the official story line is only reinforced by the other systemic failures that surround it: in our case, financial collapse, plunging asset prices, massive fraud and a corrupt, sclerotic political system that may be incapable of doing even the most simple, obvious things (like printing and spending sufficient quantities of fiat money) to stave off an deeper downward spiral.

This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier -- skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.

Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole: banished fairly quickly from public discussion and corporate media coverage -- in much the way the Iran-Contra scandal (go ahead, Wiki it) was almost immediately forgotten or ignored once it became clear that the fix was in. America apparently had its big experiment with truthtelling and reform in the post-Watergate era, and the experience was so unpleasant that nobody (or nobody who counts) is willing to go there again. That would be like expecting the Baby Boomers to start dropping acid again.

There is an upside, of course: We may actually get a break from Bush and his insufferably arrogant, dimwitted face -- that is, until he re-emerges in a couple of years as, if not exactly a respected elder statesman, then at least a harmless old geezer of an ex-president, good for the odd charity golf tournament and the occasional Larry King interview.

Cheney, on the other hand, I fully expect to be permanently banished to an undisclosed location and airbrushed out of all the old photos.

Our Future has a good summary of the worst aspects of the Bush years - Bye Bye to the Worst President Ever.

After eight long years, Bush can no longer fool the public. Polls show that he is the most unpopular president in the history of survey research. When the 2006 and 2008 elections are considered together, Bush policies resulted in the landslide rejection of his party at both the federal and state levels. There are probably a hundred examples where Bush conservatism failed, but let’s stick with the top ten.

1. The worst recession since the 1930s. The current recession will be the deepest and longest downturn since the Great Depression. And unlike other recessions, this one was directly caused by conservative anti-regulatory policy. In fact, recent evaluations show that Bush policies never created any real growth—the ephemeral financial upswings of the past eight years were based on market bubbles and economic Band-Aids.

2. The worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The Bush Administration, flacking an “ownership society,” helped manufacture the housing bubble. When it burst, Americans lost $6 trillion in housing wealth (so far) fueling a market crash which has cost Americans another $8 trillion of stock wealth, according to economist Dean Baker. On a grand scale, we’ve been mugged.

3. The worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. That’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid correctly called the Iraq war. This preemptive war—based on phony pretenses—is now the second longest in our nation’s history (after Vietnam). Some 35,000 Americans are dead or wounded, as well as an enormous number of innocent Iraqis. And even today, more than five years later, can anyone explain why Bush marched us into this quagmire?

4. Unprecedented rejection of human rights. Recently, a Bush Administration official finally admitted that the U.S. government engaged in torture at Guantanamo. Bush admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding. While these clear violations of the Geneva Convention would have been unthinkable a few years ago, today we’re not surprised. From Abu Ghraib and “extraordinary rendition,” to years-long detention of innocents and the unrestrained killing of civilians by U.S.-paid mercenaries, this administration has systematically squandered our nation’s moral standing in the world, making us less able to protect Americans and American interests worldwide.

5. Watergate-style abuses of power. As the House Judiciary Committee staff has documented, Bush used the politics of fear and division to justify warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans (including U.S. soldiers fighting overseas), spying on peaceful domestic groups, and use of national security letters to pry into the private records of millions of Americans. He also presided over illegal politicization of the Justice Department and retribution against critics. In fact, Bush claimed the authority to disobey hundreds of laws—as if Richard Nixon were right when he famously said “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

6. Unprecedented increases in inequality. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, “For the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data back in the mid-1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of this business cycle than they were when it started.” That’s because Bush policy was designed to increase economic inequality. The richest one percent of the population received 36 percent of the Bush tax cuts; the least affluent 40 percent received only 9 percent. While the rich got exponentially richer, the poverty rate and the percentage of uninsured dramatically increased.

7. A culture of sleaze. This was an Administration without shame. Kicked off by Dick Cheney’s secret energy task force, the Administration fostered a “greed is good” culture. The subsequent conservative money scandals (Jack Abramoff; White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian; Congressional Republican Rep. Bob Ney, Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Rep. Duke Cunningham and Sen. Ted Stevens) and other lawlessness (Cheney’s Chief of Staff O. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Sen. David Vitter, Sen. Larry Craig) have toppled the conservative “moral values” façade into the gutter, where it belongs.

8. Blind rejection of science. The Bush Administration thumbed its nose at scientific evidence that contradicted conservative political goals. The resulting lies about global warming, endangered species, toxic chemicals, and consumer products threaten the health and safety of every American. And the virtual outlawing of stem cell research has delayed important medical advances by years, causing immeasurable suffering and loss of life.

9. Utter refusal to protect the health, safety, and legal rights of Americans. Following the conservative business-is-always-right philosophy, Bush dismantled the agencies and rules designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous businesses, workers from reckless employers, and small companies from anti-competitive large companies. If conservatives didn’t like a federal law, they blocked, hindered, or defunded agency enforcement.

10. Presiding over our nation’s worst natural disaster, and not caring. Hurricane Katrina was transformed from a calamity into a national disgrace by the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Bush Administration. Before the hurricane struck, Bush had downsized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and placed in charge a political crony with no relevant experience. When Katrina ripped through New Orleans and inflicted nearly $100 billion in damages, making it the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, FEMA was unprepared to help and thousands of Americans suffered the consequences. More than three years later, New Orleans still has not recovered.

So, congratulations for being the worst president in American history. That’s not just my personal opinion; that’s the opinion of 109 historians polled by the History News Network. Fully 61 percent ranked Bush as the “worst ever.” Ninety-eight percent labeled his presidency a “failure.” And this poll, taken in early 2008, predated the cataclysmic housing and banking crashes. Bye bye W—history will not be kind.