Bush had "bad luck". No, he didn't.

The BBQ Pit
1

I was hoping people would at least wait until Bush is out of office before they start making excuses for him being such a miserable wretch as President.

In this CNN article, Historians: Bush presidency “battered,” “incompetent,” “unlucky”, Harvard history professor Barbara Kellerman sees it this way:

Let’s look at those three examples:

  1. 9/11. The outgoing Clinton administration had been keeping an eye on Al-Qaeda for years, and recommended keeping Al-Qaeda at the top of the list of security threats. Bush ignored that, and apparently either didn’t read or failed to absorb the August 2001 PDB “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.”

Maybe, even if he’d been properly on the job, 9/11 would have still happened. We’ll never know. But we do know he was caught absolutely flat-footed. That’s not bad luck.

  1. Hurricane Katrina. Experts had been warning for years that a major hurricane cold overwhelm the levees and flood New Orleans. Bush should at least have had a contingency plan for how FEMA would deal with exactly those circumstances. Instead, he seemed never to have heard of such an idea, and actually said “Nobody could have predicted that the levees would break.”

Any two-term President can probably expect to deal with at least one serious natural disaster. That’s not bad luck; it’s a normal test of the office, and Bush was unprepared.

  1. Financial crisis. I guess this one is arguable, but I know a lot of people saw a mortgage meltdown coming, and blamed the Bush administration for being so anti-regulation.

It’s too early in the morning for me to work up any real anger, but, gosh darn it, I’m not going to make any excuses for Bush. (And those are excuses just for his incompetence; his crimes are a whole other story. I’d love it if he died in prison.)

Fucker deserves every bit of scorn he gets. Worst President ever. We would have done better with Warren Harding’s preserved corpse sitting in the Oval Office.

2

I’m getting tired of hearing “a 9/11”. Bush didn’t deal with “A” 9/11. He dealt with 9/11. The real one.

3

I agree with your OP, except that it doesn’t go far enough. Not only was Bush shown to be incredibly incompetent in the face of several minor and major tests of the office that any other President could have easily dealt with, he’s bankrupted the entire moral grounding of our democracy. In the name of “family values” and “freedom”, he has paradoxically eroded our civil liberties, made a mockery of the Bill of Rights, successfully worked to destroy families (DOMA), taken us decades backwards in environmental protection and economic viability, and compromised our moral standing all over the world with his wink-wink-nudge-nudge position on torture and other atrocities. Bush was not “unlucky”, nor was he merely incompetent; in fact, he has been one of the most successful Presidents in history in terms of accomplishing his personal agenda.

4

For the purposes of argument, let’s say Bush had bad luck. My response is so what? The test of leadership is what you do in response to changing conditions. Bush failed horribly every time. He was faced with events that in hindsight could have been handled fairly simply.

9/11 - Suppose a failure of intetlligence gathering and that the actual event was not foreseeable. The simple and proper response is to go after the group that did it. Not start going after them and then get distracted with an unnecessary war in a country that had nothing to do with the attack. Sure, Bush might have had some bad luck, but he handled it so poorly it boogles the mind.

Katrina - Bad luck, maybe. But again a massive response when it became clear that New Orleans was going to get hit and not enough people were going to be evacuated would have changed history. Bush made some of his own bad luck in not having competent people in charge of his agencies, but the devastation could have been lessened by a better response.

Every President is faced with bad situations, whether its luck or a failure to stop events before they get rolling. What has to be remembered is how they handled it. Bush has failed every test.

5

+1

Actually, +several

Dubya is our most impeachable president. There are so many high crimes to choose from! Every president since Ike (I don’t remember Ike or JFK, but I’ve read a bit on JFK) had one or two things that maybe should have brought him to the well of the Senate, but GWB averaged - what - one a month? As I recall Shrub’s Wikipedia page has a good list of his “controversies”. I’ll go with my own list, off the top of my head, of Junior’s impeachable offenses:

  1. Taking no action in the face of the July PDB. Since FDR didn’t get impeached over Pearl Harbor that’s a pass. But Dubya wasn’t unlucky - he failed to act when he should have.

  2. Lying about the threat from Iraq. He and his administration withheld evidence, cherry picked evidence, fabricated evidence and arm-twisted Congress into a war that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. And there were no WMDs. Also GWB personally said he wanted the use of force resolution as a diplomatic tool, when in fact he wanted to use it to go to war right away. Congress looks pretty bad in this case also, but they could take their revenge. Again - not bad luck, but bad intentional actions.

  3. The prosecution of the Iraq War is an impeachably bad Epic Fail. Day after day it was clear that the whole enterprise was off the rails, but Bush did nothing different. And when he finally did something different - it was just to kick the can down the road to his successor. Again, Congress does not look good here, and neither do the American voters who re-elected the bozo in '04. But luck had nothing to do with this.

  4. Letting Bin Laden get away at Tora Bora. It was December 2001 - right at three months after the 9/11 attacks. UBL slipped through our fingers because our military moved personnel and equipment out of Afghanistan to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. The wreckage of the WTC was not even cold yet and GWB was taking us into the wrong war at the wrong place - and he did so on purpose.

  5. Black Prisons. Violating multiple treaties, and inducing our allies to violate treaties and their own Constitutions. Not an accident.

  6. Domestic wiretaps and spying. We still don’t know how extensive the current program is, nor do we know anything yet about the earlier program that ASHCROFT stopped as unconstitutional. There are press reports that tens of millions of households have been spied upon. Not bad luck.

  7. Torture. Heck, I’ll lump Guantanamo and Abu Gahraib into one charge. Not an accident! Not just the actions of a few loose cannons. This was an intentional policy change ruthlessly pursued at the highest levels despite its predictable - AND PREDICTED - failures. It will take decades for America’s reputation to recover from this.

  8. Outing a CIA agent. If you or I did this we’d be executed. Not an accident.

  9. Katrina - discussed upthread

  10. US attorney firings - not an accident

I’ve got to stop now before my head explodes. But I could go on. That’s the point - I’ve got 10 things we should have impeached Bush for, and the list is not exhaustive. None of these have anything to do with luck.

6

Conservatism would have had a real chance to take hold and flourish if it weren’t for Bush’s . . . I can’t say hypocrisy, more like 180 degree bald faced lying lip service to the cause. Now Goldwater’s and Reagan’s legacies are utterly buried and conservatism may be dead for good. Thanks, idiot, and may your neocon Fagins rot in haitch ee double hockey sticks.

Of course non-conservatives may have a different take on the outcome. But whatever it was, it wasn’t bad luck.

7

One could argue that 9/11 and Katrina occurring on his watch was indeed bad luck, however the way he handled each crisis falls smack dab at his feet and shows his incompetence and using the office for his own personal agenda (“finishing things in Iraq”).

8

I’ve said this before: Bush is not very different from Reagan.

Christian-centric conservative social agenda? Check.

Verbally backhanding “big government” and “tax-and-spenders” while running up massive deficits? Check.

Interventionist foreign policy? Check.

The only difference is that Reagan didn’t run secret prisons or eavesdrop on private citizens without a warrant (or if he did, I don’t know about it).

Koxinga, Bush didn’t kill conservatism- Conservatives did.

Re: the OP, Bush was unlucky in a sense; he had the horrible bad luck to be elected to an office he had no aptitude for. Usually, candidates who clearly don’t know how to run the country don’t get to run the country.

9

FDR- Now that was a lucky bastard. The Great Depression, WWII etc. and he could barely stand up, unaided. Man, what a cake walk. :rolleyes:

10

There was a president a while back, Abraham something or other, who took office just as the nation was entering a period of total chaos. Talk about unlucky! And the conflict lasted for years. The military was called out, there were deaths…just a major mess for everyone involved.

Someone wanna crack a history book and tell us how much blame has been placed on him in the aftermath? Surely the chronicles list this guy as just some sad sack who had misfortune after misfortune and he’s unfairly blamed for the whole thing, right?
Seriously, it’s not that the shit hit the fan, because it’s expected that some will; it’s what he then did about it.

11

Unlucky? What a crock. Maybe we should call drunk drivers without seatbelts on “unlucky” when they get hurt in car accidents.

12

Wow. You sound like a Michael Moore fan.

13

Wow, you sound like someone who has no defense for the indefensible.

14

Yeah. Bush was sure unlucky. Like all the Presidents in power during the Recession of 1807, the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1925, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857, the Crash in 1869, the Recession from 1873-1896, the Panic of 1884, the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1901, the Panic of 1907, the Recession from 1918-1921, the Depression from 1929-1939, the Recessions in 1953, 1957, 1973, 1980, 1990, and the Asian market crash in 1997.

All the Presidents who were in power during a panic, recession, or depression, you get … 23 people, not counting GW Bush. If you add up all the Presidents who weren’t in the White House during any of those years, you get … seventeen people.

The “lucky” Presidents were G. Washington, J. Adams, J. Madison, M. Van Buren, W.H. Harrison, J. Tyler, Z. Taylor, M. Filmore, A. Lincoln, W.H. Taft, C. Coolidge, H. Truman, J. Kennedy, L. Johnson, G. Ford, R. Reagan, and W.J. Clinton.

15

How about a point by point refutation of the OP?

16

My wife and I were talking about this today. Bush was unlucky.

For one, without even going into the events that occurred during his two terms, he was surrounded by friends of his Dad, who I believe is STILL much more powerful and influential than his son. Friends like Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example. How much latitude do you think W really had? You’re seeing Obama appoint people from the Clinton administration, who was largely successful in keeping these people on the outside looking in.

I’m not a Bush supporter by any stretch, but damn, I think he was in some impossible situations and made decisions where he could. Many were bad, some were good.

17

No thanks. This isn’t GD.

18

So allowing yourself to be usurped by your father, even when you hold the most powerful job in the world, is unlucky? It’s called bad management, and it applies to the guy who takes over the family bakery, and even more to the President of the United States. Last night on Kitchen Nightmares, a restaurant owner had to fire his father because he wasn’t doing the job. If George W. Bush wasn’t able to control his subordinates, that is on him. “Daddy wouldn’t let me,” stops being valid around age 12.

Character and competence are not about looking good when everything is going right. They’re about how you respond when things go horribly wrong. By that measure, Bush failed repeatedly.

19

Why can’t he be unlucky and incompetent? Works for me.

20

No, it’s much worse than that. It’s not about being afraid of Daddy, it’s about not daring to go against the network of power that can ruin you politically (and personally). That network, in this case, didn’t include W.