George W. Bush!

It has been an interesting week in the state of Texas!

First we had a fertilizer plant explosion in the small Texas town of West in which over ten people lost their lives and a multitude of houses were flattened in addition to a nursing home that had been built right across the street from the plant. The initial comments surrounded the fact that the lack of regulation in Texas would allow such a plant to be constructed so close to a facility such as an elder care facility. Then it was discovered that the plant itself had never been regulated even in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 when we all discovered what material of this type could do in the hands of individuals such as Timothy McVey. The George W. Bush administration had gone through the September eleventh bombings and had set up the elaborate security blanket costing untold billions but they could not bring themselves to regulate properly a potential terrorist target in the former presidents home state.

It has come to light that the son in law of former vice president Dick Cheney was instrumental in his role as a council for various agencies during the Bush years for having the regulation (or lack of it) moved from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security where it has been discovered that agency was not even aware that the plant that it was supposed to regulate and have oversight over even existed! There are reportedly around 200 of these plants in existence around the state of Texas and we have no idea how much dangerous ammonium nitrate may be in storage there awaiting some terrorists potential assault. After Oklahoma City we were supposed to keep this material out of the hands of people like McVey but now we have no idea how much of it is around for some terrorists, probably home grown, to simply waltz in and explode. With a plant employing under ten people we are sure that none are engaged in security.

It is interesting to note that Texas has the most liberal anti regulation laws in the nation which allow, among other things, for no regulation of any type of any business that employs ten or fewer employees.

The second big event in Texas this week was the opening of George W. Bush’s presidential library and museum. The current and all of the former president’s were there to participate in this event and many kind words were said about the second Bush and some of the better things that he had done in his presidency. Things just like what they still say about Benito Mussolini making the trains in Italy run on time were uttered about the second Bush. A big item of discussion was what George W. did on the continent of Africa. Former president Jimmy Carter related about how he convinced Bush to help end a destructive war that had gone on for over twenty years in one African country simply by attending Bush’s inauguration in 2001 and earning the gratitude of the president by simply being the only former democratic president to do so. Carter asked for Bush’s help and he got it. It should also not go uncommented upon that George W. Bush did a great deal for the AIDS effort across the continent of Africa. It should also be noted that the second Bush had an enlightened attitude toward the immigration question facing the nation today. If the republican party had listened to him some years ago, they might have done far better than the twenty seven percent of the Latino vote that they got in the last presidential election. Bush also had a progressive attitude toward gun control as opposed to what the nation faces in the conservative movement today.

Every one at the unveiling avoided talking about the Iraq war at all. President Obama did briefly mention that there had been differences over foreign policy but went into absolutely no detail over what those obvious differences were. Instead, he talked about the loneliness of power and how no one can know what a president has to go through to make a decision unless they have sat in the seat of decision making themselves. This theme was picked up on during some of the day after morning talk shows and in some newspaper op-ed’s, in which dueling opinions of the former president were put on display by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Charles Krauthammer, in one of those op-ed’s, tried to make the case that George W. Bush’s legacy to the nation and history should be something like that of Harry S. Truman who left office in 1953 with a very low approval rating in the wake of the Korean War but has seen a much more favorable take on his legacy as time has marched on. It should be noted that Bush had an approval rating of around twenty three percent when he left office but, as a former president, it has recovered to around forty seven percent as of this present time. Krauthammer tries to make the case that because Barack Obama has followed much of the policy and procedure that Bush put in place pertaining to national security in the wake of September eleventh, that he should be considered some sort of pioneer in this area and that history will regard him as such just a few decades down the road. This might have been true if Bush had not gone down the path that he took in regards to the Iraq invasion. That invasion coupled with the misadventures that the nation faced as a result of his love of deregulation and the financial collapse that resulted from so much of it will forever cloud the Bush presidency and will probably cast it forever in an increasingly less favorable light.

One story that comes out of the Bush years relates to how the president perceived himself when the Iraq invasion took place. Bush described himself as the quarterback of the invasion team until a senior aid suggested that he might be better thought of as the coach of the team. This sports concept fit in well for a man who had been the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team before he entered politics as an active player. However, when one uses the Truman analogy one must remember what Harry S. Truman actually believed when one went into his oval office and saw the plaque on his desk that simply stated: The buck stops here! No matter what Bush himself or his cohorts may say, he is the one who will bear history’s ultimate decision on his presidency.

At best, George W. Bush might have been a two term president in uneventful times but Bush himself along with his neoconservative friends created much of the eventfulness that will becloud him through coming history. When Bush took office we were a nation that was balancing our books, paying down our debt, and finding employment for most of our citizenry. When he left office after eight long years, we were a nation on the brink of a depression that might have made the seventy percent of the population close to the farm 1932 event look like a spring picnic. Bush’s father wanted nothing to do with the organization for a new American century that his son so readily went to bed with but that organization so affected the son’s outlook and his thinking that it single-handedly destroyed his presidency with its great desire to fulfill what it liked to say when it stated: “America is an empire now!�

When George W. Bush took office we were, as a nation, about to reap the benefits of the end of the cold war completely and its need for less military spending. When he left office, we had the highest military budget in this or any other nations history and were engaged in two simultaneous conflicts for the first time since the end of the second world war. And there are those who question, in light of how the intelligence was handled and presented in the run up to the Iraq invasion with Central Intelligence operatives like the notorious “Curveball“, whether the Bush team knew before September eleventh occurred that it was going to take place and sanctioned it to achieve all of the changes that have since occurred. There is no public proof of that fact readily at hand but if it were true Bush and all of his inner circle involved in any of it would have to be tried for treason and probably executed. When this writer heard former president Bill Clinton mention the two hundred million e-mails stored at the Bush library, we wondered what secrets might be found there at some future date.

As it stands right now, the one prevalent fact is that when George W. Bush left office this nation had added almost six trillion dollars to its national debt and left his predecessor with little choice but to borrow much more just to try to keep the nation’s economy afloat with stimulus and other governmental interventions.

In the final analysis, George W. Bush’s place in history is not in his hands. If this nation goes down the tubes he and his republican friends are going to get most of the blame for it. If Barack Obama is successful in pulling this thing together, Bush will, at best, be remembered as certainly no Harry Truman but more likely some sort of twenty first century version of Herbert Hoover with the caveat that Hoover inherited a simmering mess while the second Bush created one all on his own--with a lot of help from his friends!

This writer is reminded of president James Buchanan when he thinks of George W. Bush. Buchanan was the one term president who inhabited the White House just before the presidency of Abraham Lincoln began. Buchanan did nothing to head off the building crisis that led to the American civil war even though there were things that he might have been able to do to avert it. One wag published a political cartoon of George W. Bush at the time of his leaving the White House that told the former president that he had been a civil rights pioneer because his incompetence had led to the election of the first black president in American history. We remember all of the horrible cartoons that depicted Abraham Lincoln in such a negative light during the American civil war and some others that have done the same thing with Barack Obama. Perhaps George W. Bush will be the twenty first century’s James Buchanan and Obama will play the role of Mr. Lincoln. The crisis that Bush left were certainly great enough to warrant that comparison and the way that president Obama handles them will decide where his place in history will ultimately be. There is little doubt, however, that Harry Truman is in no danger of being surpassed by George W. Bush in the rankings of presidential greatness in this or any other century! In point of fact the man who stated at his address at the opening of his library that he was at one point in his life less likely to be found inside a library than to found one should have never sat in the oval office at all! And we are all poorer for the fact that he did. The fact that this man was able to become president because of around five hundred votes in the state of Florida and go on to do what he did is the best argument that we have ever seen for reforming the American electoral system and getting rid of the electoral college in it entirety.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe