Could be – I suppose they were a pretty decent boon to the rich, but I didn’t notice enough extra money to make a difference on anything.
As far as prseidential comparisons go, I’ve been hearing that Bush may be the new Hoover. Just like Hoover’s presidency ensured 20 years of Democratic rule afterward, Bush’s presidency could do the same thing. If so, the liberals ought to be grateful to Bush. I can’t say I see any Roosevelts out there, though, except for MAYBE Gore, who says he’s not running.
I think he’ll go down as the president who completely and utterly fucked up one of the best chances in recent times to go down in history as a great President. A moderately decent president could have taken what Bush had to work with and come out of it looking fantastic.
I think a better comparision comes from the state of the union on 2003 (the same one where Bush lied to the American people on Iraq)
Oh, yes they will pass it, all the efforts of this lame duck administration are geared to pass the buck to other presidents.
On the matter of investigations, Truman does clean Bush’s clock:
Truman:
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=472
Pissing off military contractors, but making a general thank Truman later because his efforts then allowed more army divisions to be properly prepared for the big war.
Bush:
Investigate corruption with the current military contractors? mmm, I know! I will give them a tax cut!
:smack:
Truman is really rolling in his grave.
Pardon a Brit for sticking his nose in.
Given the situation in the ME I doubt very much that any US prez could have come up smelling of roses.
IMO
Also, both of them ate french fries and fucked the help. Then again, Jefferson wasn’t a very good president, and though I didn’t care much for Clinton I don’t think he was a bad president.
Marc
That anyone would even ask the question dumbfounds me.
Wikipedia? There’s a much more fun source.
Oh, I don’t know. There are already books written about his many off-the-cuff sayings. And page-a-day calenders. And bumper stickers.
There’s no better way to say it, unless you want to totally redefine the word “great.”
Hell, no. Not even if he dies in office.
Possibly. However, the WTC/Pentagon attacks garnered a significant amount of world sympathy (including throughout the MENA region, a few handsful of street partiers notwithstanding). There was very little opposition to the destruction of the Taliban–especially as the actual on-the-ground forces were perceived as Afghanis retaking their country. Had Bush gotten a genuine coalition of countries together to secure the Afghanistan countryside as peacekeepers and hunt for al Qaida while attempting to engage in the “nation building” that he scorned in Afghanistan and pretended to embrace in Iraq, I suspect that he would not have created the rallying point to recruit new terrorists that he so magnificently achieved in Iraq.
Without the arm-twisting he applied to get smaller MENA nations to give lip-service to the very unpopular Iraq invasion, he would not have jeopardized the survival of nations like Jordan–nations that he has since begun supporting as anti-democratic authoritarian regimes that, even if they suppress their people long enough to get past the current crisis, will come back to haunt us in the way that many of our pet dictatorships have haunted us following the end of the Cold War.
Had he not made his idiotic “Axis of Evil” speech, he would have been in a better position to use carrot-and-stick diplomacy to encourage Iran to continue its move toward a moderate government, rather than scaring the theocrats into disenfranchising the opposition political parties and reasserting absolute control.
Without his invasion of Iraq and Rice’s not-so-veiled threats against Syria, that nation would have probably been more amenable to continuing its decade long negotiations with Israel to secure more stability in that region (reducing Syria’s belief that it needed to support Hezbollah).
By demonstrating a measured response in Afghanistan instead of an idiotic neocolonial conquest in Iraq, I suspect that he would have reduced the ability of al Qaida and the Wahabbists to point to the Great Satan and persuade Muslims across the world that the U.S. and the West really are threats to Islam.
Smellling of roses? Pehaps not, but perhaps smelling of daisies instead of dog turds.
While tomndebb responded to this quite well, I was hoping to get some clarification. Which situation in the ME are you referring to, exactly?
Probably akin to how we remember Pearl Harbor, tho in a lot of ways actions after-the-fact bear few parallels. The point here is A) we are still too close to this event to perhaps give it proper perspective, but I suspect the tendency now is to overrate it, and B) compared to the other dangers out civilization faces, international terrorism isn’t much. Now if the essobees detonate a nuke over NY or something, THAT will have major implications. We recall the singular events, even if they are relatively insignificant; we tend to not think much about the longer term issues which take their sweet time in making their effects known (“Hey Thag, wall of ice closer today?”-Gary Larson*).
There will be one significant difference. Slavery’s persistence into the middle of the 19th century has relatively few ramifications today. Sure there’s residual racism (see Imus, Don) but in terms of how it affects our lives today the whats and whyfores of the 19th century Southern US culture exist mainly as a historical curiosity.
With global warming what our leaders did (or didn’t do) this decade will most certainly be relevant to future generations, and they most certainly will be either puzzled and/or angry, and with good cause, over the path we chose. 9-11 killed 4,000 people; yes it was horrible but environmental degradation will be responsible for many many times the suffering. That anyone can question that now just proves my point about our procrastinating, passing-the-buck ways. Frostillicus listed a bunch of things Bush bungled, but 50-100 years from now nobody will remember Terry Schiavo or most of the other things he listed. However Bush’s inactions on global warming et al. will most certainly be remembered. Or they won’t because history will be over and our descendants will be living in caves.
*Yes I know we are losing glaciers now not gaining them. Beside my point.
Don’t kid yourself. Two steps to establish Bush as a Great President:
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Significant improvements in the Middle East. This doesn’t have to be a result of the Iraq invasion. And “improvements” can be defined many ways.
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A nice biopic that wins an Oscar, maybe ten years after his death.
We’ve made bigger heroes out of similar idiots.
The deficit: Spending borrowed money is always fun, it’s repaying it that sucks.
Saddam Hussein: Overthrowing him was a good thing. It’s been mostly downhill in Iraq since.
I’m dying to know who these were.
George Armstrong Custer?
At least he got killed before he could run for President.