All the usual partisan crap, spewed forth constantly in what purports to be our “Great Debates” forum. What drek.
You cannot possibly know whether or not George W. Bush will be “teh worst Prez evah!” only a year after he has left the office. Hell, you haven’t even begun to see what confidential information he and his administration were working with when they made their decisions. Those relevations in future years could result in everything from universal condemnation to universal approval. Judging him on an overall context, against presidents for whom we have that sort of context, is simply silly.
Everyone here knows my position on these sorts of things. I’m a middle-of-the-road sort of guy. I vote both sides of the aisle, depending upon what I perceive to be the virtues of the candidates to be. I’ve voted for winning presidents and losing presidents (more than once each!), and although I’ve never voted for a losing Republican presidential candidate, I would have in 1976 if I had been just two years older at the time. So I’m not a partisan person, with some sort of agenda (oh, sorry, agendum :p) to harp on while saying this.
It must first be accepted that Presidents receive praise/blame for a lot of things neither they themselves, nor their administration (that is, the political hacks they put in charge when they become president) can truly be considered to have accomplished/failed to do. Congress, you know, passes laws, sets the budget, taxes the people, etc. Blaming President Bush for the economic meltdown of the last two years is simply ridiculous; his administration had a part in it, but so, too, did the policies established by Congress, and the Fed, and the people in power during the administration of President Clinton (hell, it actually goes all the way back to President Reagan). And while it is certainly no picnic to be living through these times for some people, it’s quite impossible to try and compare the current situation to the situation during the late-70s and early-80s, since we don’t know for sure how long this will last, we don’t know what the long-term effect will be, and we don’t even have a compete yardstick for comparison of what we DO know has happened. So pointing at the last President and screaming that this is all HIS fault, and that this is so much worse than the last economic fuck-up we suffered through is simply unbelievably childish. It’s the sort of comment I’d expect from the students in my Algebra I repeater class, who see things in exactly this sort of unnuanced, black/white way, without the ability to utilize anything approaching reason to sort things out.
(For what it is worth, having lived through both, btw, I’ll take a recession over the totally out-of-whack economic situation we lived through in the period 1978 - 1983; THAT was definitely scary, even for people who were not at the raw end of the deal) :eek:
Similarly, attempting to lay everything Katrina at President Bush’s doorstep is an egregious over-simplification. FEMA has been abysmally bad for a very, very long time. The response to Loma Prieta was a harbinger of things to come, though fortunately the number of displaced people was relatively miniscule in that situation. I lived through Loma Prieta, I saw the trailer parks first hand, I know what troubles there were with parcelling out relief; it was cocked-up four ways for Sunday. And while responses to various disasters thereafter were sometimes better, sometimes not so much, there was never a sense in my mind that FEMA had truly gotten its collective act together. Katrina was destruction on an unprecedented scale in this country. We literally had never seen anything like it. And we weren’t prepared to handle it.
Is some of that due to President Bush’s appointee? Of course it is. But it’s also due to the fact that Congress was spending much of the decade reshaping the financial structure of federal-state governmental authority and revenue sourcing. It’s also due to the fact that the officials in the state of Louisiana screwed-up big time. And, just as we learn from our earthquake experiences (ever since 1932, for example, California has required that frame houses be “J”-bolted into their foundations, which has reduced housing losses in earthquakes substantially since), or our terrorist tragedies, we will learn from Katrina. But make no mistake: whatever we learn from Katrina, if, say, New York City were to be devastated by some huge disaster, we’d have a monumental catastrophe for no other reason than the fact that we just wouldn’t have any concept of the scope of such a thing.
It is my opinion that the last president made some truly huge mistakes. I have long stated that the Iraq war was totally unnecessary. I consider use of military force for what I perceive to be the true reasons we used it a reprehensible thing to do. Socially, I am often opposed to the fundamental basis for much of what the Republican base wants done, and thus viewed much of what the Bush administration did, or wanted to do, socially with skepticism. And as a teacher, I am vociferous in my objection to much of what was done in NCLB. Other criticisms can be leveled. Nevertheless, I would never dream of trying to compare the last president to someone who’s failings we know so well as those of Buchanan, or Polk, or Jackson, or any other president from our past you care to try and vilify. Even if we had an agreed-upon yardstick for making such comparisons, we simply don’t have the needed perspective to do the measuring.
Probably a relatively bad president? Yeah, likely true (though as with many bad presidents, there were good things accomplished as well; see, e.g., Nixon). Worst evah!? Get real. :rolleyes: