See, you may think that lying and invading a country for no remotely valid reason whatsoever is among the greatest follies a president can commit, especially if it all goes badly awry. But George Bush and History know better.
You may think that letting the gang who supposedly attacked us on 9/11 roam free to plan further attacks would be a really stupid idea. But George Bush and History will ultimately demonstrate the obscure yet powerful logic proving the wisdom behind that policy decision.
You may think that doing nothing and allowing one of your country’s major cities to drown represents, at best, criminal negligence. But you obviously don’t know History like that great scholar of the subject, George W. Bush, does.
You probably operate under the commonly-held illusion that turning, virtually overnight, the country’s greatest-ever surplus into its greatest-ever deficit is not a quality we should particularly admire in our presidents. But George W. Bush knows that History will vindicate him in the end.
And you undoubtedly think that exacerbating the threat of a looming environmental crisis while undermining every attempt to solve the problem ought to be an impeachable offense. But George Bush understands that History – should it manage to survive – will write the story quite differently.
How can he be so sure to get a favorable reception from history, when the odds seem so daunting? He could adopt Winston Churchill’s method. The old man once said that "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." That might work, except for two small problems. One is that Churchill had way more raw material to work with than Bush. He actually got the one big thing of his era right, when others didn’t (and even though he messed up a lot of other stuff along the way). The other problem with the Churchill plan is that the prime minister actually knew how to speak the language, a necessary predicate to writing history, whereas the verbal skills of the Toxic Texan might charitably be described as laughable at best.
"Couldn’t I just buy some historians?", W is no doubt wondering. Don’t doubt that the thought hasn’t more than once crossed the mind, such as it is, of this ultimate child of privilege, who has had everything in his entire lifetime handed to, if not stolen for, him.
Indeed, perhaps they’ve already begun the process. After all, there are a whole lot of "scholars" at the Heritage Foundation and similar institutions who will soon be badly in need of some work, now that their previous theories have crashed and burned and angry lynch mobs will soon be prowling the capitol, on the hunt for regressives foolish enough to have strayed from the rapidly thinning herd.
Bush could hire an army of publicists masquerading as historians to fill a library with such nonsense. No doubt he will. It’s hard to see how it could matter, though. Beyond the many disasters enumerated on the very partial list above, he has essentially four arguments by which he believes that his presidency is ultimately vindicated. None of these, of course, are legitimate, and three of them are minor league (Bush League?) anyhow, compared to the fourth.
One is that he delivered a great educational package, No Child Left Behind, and in so doing reformed America’s ruined public system of pedagogy. Turns out there’s a bit more (and less) to the story, though. Like test scores that haven’t risen. Like angry teachers, parents and students who despise the legislation. Like unfunded mandates that the states can’t handle. Like any subject other than English and math being unceremoniously chucked in the garbage can because they don’t contribute to the all-determinative ratings of students and schools, and therefore the bottom-line for funding allocations. Oh, and then there are the minor matters of states’ rights and small government that regressives are always endlessly pretending to care about. Too bad about that massive intrusion of the federal government into educational policy, eh? But then it wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t hypocritical, would it?
Bush’s second great claim to fame is that his tax cuts (actually tax transfers – from the wealthy to the rest of us, and from this generation to the next) have created a robust economy during his tenure. Again, it doesn’t even really look good on paper, let alone in the real world. First of all, the economy seems woefully lacking in solidity of late, as though it could come apart at the seams at any moment. Even Wall Street has probably noticed that by now, though I doubt anyone there is wishing they could get a do-over and vote for Kerry. Secondly, whatever the economy has been these last years, it sure hasn’t done anything for the middle-, working- or under-classes. It’s been a rip-roaring wild wagon ride for the top one or two percent, who now literally own like about half the country. But we poor slobs living below Economic Olympus are lucky if we’re breaking even these days. And then, of course, there’s the not so small matter of the cost paid to achieve this allegedly stellar economy. The supposed tax cuts have massively exacerbated the national debt, currently just shy of $9 trillion, or about $60,000 per taxpayer, and increasing at the rate of about $1.5 billion per day, plus interest. Hey, what a bargain, huh? In exchange for your $60,000 (and rapidly rising) debt liability, you got a tepid economy that further enriched the leisure class, a couple of useless wars, and no money left over for Social Security or Medicare when you retire. If you can retire.
Maybe it’s just my own radical loony-left bias, but I don’t think history is going to look to kindly on the administration’s policies or ‘successes’ in the economic domain, any more than in the educational. Not, by the way, that the tax transfers were ever intended for that purpose anyhow. Remember how Bush advocated for them in 2000, during the campaign, when the economy was ripping? And how just months later he insisted on them again in 2001, when the economy had by then gone south? Gee, if only he hadn’t been so hammered that day in his macro economics course when they discussed countercyclical fiscal policy. Maybe he would have realized that the same prescription doesn’t work for both a boom and a bust economy. Of course, that (wrongly) presumes that economic theory, good governance or fundamental principle had the slightest relationship to the administration’s motivation for the slashing of taxes. Instead, as with so many BushCo initiatives, the arrow between cause and effect was bent backwards. You start with what you want to do and then figure out a way to justify it afterwards. As the Downing Street Memo reminds us, "the facts were being fixed around the policy" – not the other way around.
A third ‘success’ that the administration claims, rightly so, is that they’ve loaded up the federal bench with as many über-class legal neanderthals as they could find. And if they also happened to be racist, sex-obsessed freaks as well, then, hey, more’s the merrier. If these robed regressives didn’t have skinned knuckles they could pass for eighteenth century spoiled rotten English aristocrats any day. Yep – no doubt about it. They did it. These monsters are everywhere you turn in the federal judiciary, and they’re going to be there for a very long time. And it’s even true that many Americans are happy at the notion of having ‘conservative’ judges dominating the bench. Some will even still be happy about that five or ten years from now. A lot of others, however, are going to find out what these judges are really all about (hint: it goes jingle-jangle in your pocket – or more properly, in someone else’s pocket), and they’re going to have some serious second thoughts about the pig in the poke they purchased during the Bush years, a gift that will keep on giving for decades.
All this – education, taxes, judges – is well and good, of course. But at the end of the day the Bush presidency has really staked its entire reputation on just one claim, a fact that even they might admit to. This is the "war president", remember? And this presidency is all about security. Bush believes he will live or die in the history books according to this single criterion, and he may be right. (I actually believe that the last word on the Bush administration and the regressive movement it championed will show that everything – and I mean everything – was about kleptocracy. But, meanwhile, there’s 9/11 and a couple of wars to consider, with maybe a third to come in Iran if Cheney gets his way – and doesn’t he always? – so this is still the war president.)
That said, it is more clear than the space between Bush’s ears that the administration has been a complete failure on this front. The big bad guy and his pals who supposedly did 9/11 roams free to this day, six years after the attack. Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan is going the same direction as that other war. The US military has been crushed in Iraq, a country which had as much to do with 9/11 as did, say, Kyrgyzstan or Burkina Faso, and which posed the equivalent (non-)risk to American security. Our border patrol is so vigilant that a known carrier of tuberculosis can waltz right in. Our ports and chemical and nuclear facilities remain almost no less completely vulnerable than they were six years ago, because the industries’ desire to avoid spending a nickel on security bests all other government priorities. Our alliances have been left in tatters by an administration whose arrogance was only ever trumped by its hubris. Our friends in China and Russia laugh at their good fortune to have keystone cops for rivals, watching as we shoot ourselves simultaneously in both feet with an insanely massive arsenal, while they rapidly rise in economic and military – and therefore also political – power.
These are the supposed successes, not one of which – surprise, surprise – turns out to be. I’ve only barely begun to list the failures. You could spend a lifetime recounting those.
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