As the George W. Bush presidency comes to an end (not a moment too soon), the assessments of his reign are pouring in. The only remotely kind one is, of course, from George W. Bush himself, who, with characteristic myopia, thinks he did an okay job. Oh, he wishes the intelligence on Iraq would have been better (of course, he doesn't mention the lengths to which his administration went to jigger the evidence and then to misrepresent it), he did a fine job during Katrina, the economic disaster just happened to occur during his watch, but he really had nothing to do with it, his people didn't torture (because they just decided that things that used to be considered torture no longer qualified), America didn't actually lose it's moral standing in the world, and on and on.
Dubya may be leaving, but the harm he and his minions did will live on for many years.
Our children should be very afraid.
The Torture Report is out, and it tells the story we've long suspected--that the authorization for extreme interrogation techniques came from the highest levels of government. Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales, in particular, signed off on harsh treatment of detainees, despite warnings that what they were authorizing was, in fact, a violation of the Geneva Convention and of our own laws. They listened, instead, to crackpot legal theories put forth by David Addington, assistant to Vice President Cheney and Gonzales, which assigned to the president unprecedented wartime powers to ignore all standards of human decency this nation has subscribed to in war and peace throughout its history. This is one of the saddest chapters in all of American history. We're supposed to be the good guys. We're the good guys because we don't do what the bad guys do. If we do what the bad guys do, then we're the bad guys. You can argue with that, but I'm not listening. I just hope that Obama has the courage to investigate his predecessors and demand not only accountability, but also justice, even if it means putting our nation's war criminals on trial.
Dubya has become the Rodney Dangerfield of presidents. He doesn't get any respect, not from his own party when he's trying to save the auto industry, not from America's allies, who are counting the days until the president-elect takes office, and not in Iraq, where he was greeted with a pair of shoes thrown at his head by an angry Egyptian journalist. Frankly, I wish American reporters had been anywhere close to that tough on him when he was ginning up reasons to invade Iraq. Maybe if the oh-so-polite press conferences he held had been a little more dangerous, he might not have gotten away with the policies that have left us where find ourselves today.
George W. Bush. in a wide-ranging interview on ABC, actually used the "sorry" word. It was way short of an apology, of course, but in his own limited way, he expressed remorse for the state of the economy, and for the jobs lost to the economic catastrophe that's taking place on his watch. He's right, of course, that it wasn't all his administration's fault. Some of the regulatory changes that allowed the pirates of Wall Street to abscond with the national wealth happened during earlier administrations, but Bush's will always be remembered for presiding over the worst economy since the Great Depression. His absolute faith in a marketplace unfettered by any rules, abetted by his party's coziness with K Street lobbyists, and his willful refusal to heed the many warnings that preceded the collapse, made a preventable disaster inevitable. Some legacy.
