Long ago and far away!
Looking at this weeks events surrounding the continuing senate battle for conformation of former Republican senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel reminds us profusely that we are approaching the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The neoconservative Republicans in the senate have, at least temporarily, blocked the Hagel confirmation because, as the very bellicose but honest senator from Arizona--John McCain--has stated, they have not forgotten how Chuck Hagel treated former president George W. Bush during Hagel’s time in the senate while Bush was still in office. Apparently, one of the worst things that Hagel said was that Bush was the worst president since Herbert Hoover. We wrote here recently that we were not impressed with Hagel’s confirmation hearing and that we had questions about Hagel’s ability to carry out the duty’s of the office of Secretary of Defense because of how he came across during those hearings. However, we have no argument with what Hagel supposedly said about George W. Bush, except to note that it may be an insult to the memory of Herbert Hoover to place him in the same class with George W. Bush. Much of what happened to Herbert Hoover happened by chance and he was a victim of an entire age of poor economic oversight that led up to the Great Depression beginning on his watch. Granted, Hoover did little to mitigate the effects of that Depression during the remaining three plus years of his presidency, but he at least gave it all that he had, often working long hours in the White House to try to repair the damage that had been done. George W. Bush was a playboy president who was usually in bed by nine o’clock in the evening when he wasn’t off cutting brush on his Texas ranch!
George W. Bush and the band of people that comprised his version of “all the presidents men” took a nation that was prosperous and, over the course of the next eight years, led it to the gateway of ruin that we still have not totally recovered from to this date. No one may ever know how great a president that Barack Obama might have been because Obama had to spend the first four years of his presidency trying to repair the damage that Bush had done during the last eight years before that time. For those who say that presidents do not have much influence on events over the larger scheme of things we simply point to George W. Bush as the total rejection of that point of view.
Presidents do matter, and, so often, in an outsized way!
This nation may never recover completely from the excesses of the Bush years and his illegitimate presidency set this country rather permanently on a course that was entirely different from what it should have taken. When Bush took office, this nation had been paying down a national debt that had finally been brought under control. Bush added over six trillion dollars to that debt and left us in a situation that was completely out of control. In addition to that, he took a situation that was fairly stable in the Middle East because of what his father had done in the first gulf war and completely destabilized it and set that region forever on a different path. And, he admitted to the former French president that he did it because of what his God had supposedly told him to do. We are faithful just as well and we know that Satan whispers in the ears of the weak and the stupid and George W. Bush definably fit into both of those categories.
George W. Bush was really nothing but the tool of a group of people whose main desire was, and still is, to destroy the federal government by any means possible, leaving its only remaining function the ability to go to war. In 2006, they even began the destruction of the United States Postal Service, one of the most basic of government services that there is! The only rhyme or reason to what the ones known as the neoconservative Republicans exist for is the destruction of institutions that do not involve war. They are totally against any form of regulation and want to live in a laissez-faire world where only the biggest, the strongest, and the most well positioned can survive. For a group that positions itself with the creationists in this world, the neocons certainly believe in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and its application in the very primordial law of the economic and social jungle. It is a jungle of a Tarzan sort of existence and its just too bad if one hit’s a greasy vine as one swings from tree to tree to tree!
We know something about the ranking of American presidents and we also know this: most of the presidents who are at the bottom of the list lived and served during times of little consequence when little was going on in the nation. These men had little effect on the nation’s course and merely served out their usually one term presidencies and have been almost totally forgotten by history. They say that controversy is a great component of building a great presidency but, as in the case of George W. Bush, it is also the way to place yourself in a class all of your own. No president in American history has ever affected a nation in such a negative way as George W. Bush has done. As we previously said in this piece, Herbert Hoover was as much the victim of circumstances as anything else. His watch saw a great change in the American economy that only one of Americas greatest presidents was able to affect--Franklin D. Roosevelt. George W. Bush’s watch saw him take a nation completely off course and he was solely responsible for those course corrections.
As Harry Truman put it so well--”the buck stops here!”
We used to think that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents in American history. After almost ten years since he took the nation into a war that did not in any way need to be fought, we think that Mr. Bush has achieved a very special place in the rankings of the presidents. As far as it goes with us right now, George W. Bush is by far the worst president ever to sit in the White House and the race to the bottom that he has won is not even close. George W. Bush was a combination of ignorance and arrogance that has been rarely seen in the American political world. Bush was a “C” student in a job that requires “A+ capabilities! The only thing that might have saved us from him and the consequences of his actions is the fact that not only did we elect the first black president in our history to follow him into office, but, also, that we may have elected, in Barrack Obama, one of the deepest and most profound thinkers and decisive movers and shakers that the American presidency has ever seen. In addition to what he did to mitigate the economic straits that the nation found itself in at the beginning of his term, his single minded determination to change the course of America’s health delivery system places him in a class by himself. The Obama story is still incomplete and there is much time for him to screw things up all on his own. But, as it stands right now, we have a president who brought this nation back from the edge of a depression that might have made the one that FDR faced look like a Sunday picnic. In addition to that, president Obama is slowly building an economy that is, for the first time in decades, not built on economic bubbles and that will likely form the basis for a national prosperity that may take us through a good portion of the early part of this new twenty first century. Barack Obama has the capacity for growth that the stunted Bush never knew but Obama’s arrogance in no way matches that of the younger Bush!
It is a staple in religion and faith humor that if you want to know if God has a sense of humor, tell him about your future plans. However if any of Barrack Obama’s plans work out, there may be many good days ahead for this nation that is so currently evenly divided between blue and red. President Obama has a trait that so many lack. He is a very patient man who sees the world as it is and is willing to work daily to make it a better place for the least and the greatest of us to live and work and play. And, when those final presidential rankings come out some day, hopefully far into the future, Barack Obama and George W. Bush will be worlds apart when they are published!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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