Way too late. Sorry. If you can’t see it, there’s no way you can be shown.
Rummy’s track record has clearly been a disaster since last spring. Bush rehired him.
How many ‘bad apples’ do there have to be, before one has to acknowledge a systemic problem? We’re well over a hundred already. Plus we’ve got the torture memos from the White House, and apparently a secret Executive Order now.
Sure, it’s been going on for years. But the scientific record became a lot more definitive in the late 1990s, and when Bush was running in 2000, he burnished his illusion of moderation by claiming he’d act to limit CO2 emissions. Then he changed his mind shortly after inauguration, dissed Kyoto and said his Administration would produce an alternative…we’re still waiting.
No global accord on attempts to ameliorate man’s impact on global warming is meaningful without US participation, seeing as how we’re the world’s largest economy. GWB has now been in charge of the stall-ball in dealing with global warming for four years, and he’ll stall for another four years. If a hypothetical Dem President and Congress in 2009 act quickly and decisively on CO2 emissions, they’ll still be trying to cause those emission levels to level out by 2012 or 2015, and then start the slow march back toward year-2000 emissions levels. Essentially, every year you act means you have a year’s slippage on emissions levels, plus another year needed to undo that year’s slippage.
In the case of global warming, inaction sufficed. The huge budget deficits are now overwhelmingly due to Bush tax cuts. Those deficits, and the trade deficits they help finance, are why our dollar will plummet in value over the next year or so, and why our dollar has a very good chance of ceasing to be the world’s reserve currency soon - something that would have been unthinkable just four years ago. Not to mention, if the dollar’s plummet happens in a month or two, rather than over a couple years, the result will likely be worldwide recession. That’ll be Bush’s fault if it happens, in the sense that it will take a great deal of combined luck and kindness of strangers to forestall it.
And then there is Iraq as well.
To portray Bush as a passive actor, with no real responsibility for events, in the midst of his own Administration, is intellectually dishonest. There is no evidence that he has been defrauded and misled. He has rehired, praised, and even given medals to the subordinates (Bremer, Tenet) who might have been responsible for aspects of the perfect storm that is the Bush Administration. And in having done so, he’s said he’s George Bush, and he approves these people’s actions. So let’s get real, OK? When Iraq, the dollar, and the economy all tank, you can thank George. When Canada’s winters are temperate, and the southern tier of US states becomes too hot for habitation, think on GWB’s period of inaction during the first decade when the reality of global warming became indisputable.
It used to be said that to err is human, but to really screw up requires a computer. That has been proven false. GWB for Man of the Year, Man of the Decade, and early favorite for Man of the Century.