I think it's still way too early to honestly and objectively assess his presidency. In another twenty years or so, we'll honestly get to see the long-standing effects of the policies that he put into play.

I agree it will take a while to see the full extent of the damage he's done but just on a four years out assessment, I think there's enough evidence to label him as the worst president we've ever had....

 

1.  There's still a nagging doubt to this day that George W stole the 2000 election.

 

2.   His pre-9/11 attitude towards Islamic Terrorism and more specifically Osama bin Laden even when he got intelligence briefings indicating that  commercial airlines will be used for a domestic terrorist attack.

 

3.   Starting the Afghanastan war that we are still embroiled in today with no exit plan.

 

4.   Starting the Iraq war for no reason whatsoever.   That alone damns his presidency to the bottom in history.

 

5.   His handling of the Katrina situation.

 

6.   Bringing America to the brink of economic depression.

 

7.   Creating the toxic political atmosphere we have today with the Swift Boating of John Kerry and by using the politics of division.

 

The reason America is so polarized, angry, more racist can be traced back to "W".    I'm sure he's an okay guy in private life but his presidency is the worst the US has ever endured.

 

 

Iraq. Letting Bin Laden out of his sights. Supporting anti-gay marriage amendments. Driving a shism between two halves of the country. Furthering the ideals of ignorance and xenophobia as positive, admirable traits. The deregulation of mortgages and both the real estate and banking industries. Iraq. Feeding a festering a culture that thrives on hate and mistrust. Ahbu Graib. Guantanamo. Torture. Rendition. Katrina. Iraq.

 

Nope, he can still rot.

Regardless of what you think of him--evil, feckless, greedy, just plain stupid--this guy was so in over his head.  He could strut his stuff and play tough guy with the 9/11 bullshit that we had to suffer through.  But his true colors shone brightly during the start of the financial crisis.  His face during briefings revealed all you had to know: the man had no idea what was going on and, more to the point, no idea what to do.  His lieutenants weren't much better. 

 

I think his legacy will be a demoralized and broken civil service that left the federal government rudderless for a good part of Obama's first term in office.  The man replaced long serving professionals at State, DOJ, and other agencies with cronies whose sole qualification was that they loved Jesus just as much as W.

 

The incompetence exhibited during all 8 years of W's presidency is more of an indictment of his tenure than any evil motives we may ascribe to him and his cabinet--leaving Cheney and Rumsfeld aside.

 

Yeah, pretty much all this.  Don't forget the ban on federal funding for stem cell research.  As someone who comes from a family with a history of Alzheimer's, this pisses me off to this day.

 

 

I grew up in a very conservative home (to this day my mother has a shrine to her GOP favorites -- W, Palin, and Ronnie -- hanging on a bulletin board in the kitchen), so I always considered myself a republican without really known why or what that meant.  It is really thanks to GWB’s presidency that I did a lot of soul searching and reading and learning and discovered that a lot of my opinions and beliefs did not match up with the GOP in any way.  So, in a selfish way, his time in office taught me a lot about my own politics, which I appreciate.

 

 

I'd even go so far as to say that, while it cost the country dearly, his clusterfuck of a presidency was a something of a gift to the 21st century. In that, finally, the horrors born from the Republican/Conservative agenda had been brought to light for the world to see. Bush's presidency cost the GOP their legitimacy in the eyes of an entire generation. As the present GOP race demonstrates, the only people left in the room are the nuts, twits, & crooks. That "Morning In America" shit is dead or dying.

So, yeah, I'd say that Bush paved the way for centrists & the left, at least for the next two Presidential cycles. Obama wasn't the "cure-all" that so many people hoped for but I'd wager that the corporate leash will be noticeably looser in his 2nd term & we'll see Elizabeth Warren on a Palin-esque fast track toward a POTUS run in 2016. God willing.

From your lips to God's ears, but I think that's right.  Especially once the god damned Baby Boomers are dead.  These next couple of decades will be a wild ride.  I'll be shocked if those bastards don't take us with them.

 

I remember when nimrods would say without a hint of irony that he was the "greatest president this country ever had." That kind of talk died out late in his second term, but yeesh. He wasn't even the greatest president named George Bush.

He was all ready to settle in to a nice, nondescript presidency that would require little to no effort and that would make a nice memoir one day.  Then along came 9-11 and he ended up actually having to work at it.  Look at his face when he's in that classroom getting the first word of the attacks.  That's not "Oh no, America is under attack."  That's "Well there goes the joy ride."

Here's one thing George W can brag about that the current GOP candidates can't (aside from maybe Ron Paul).   His followers are a passionate bunch.   I want to say that even to this day you can find folks who believe George W was the best president we ever had and that any faults of his are due to what Clinton did back in the 90's   I still remember that scene from Jesus Camp where a cut out of GWB was brought into a church and prayed over.    That's the one thing I bet the GOP misses.   That kind of passion in the base.

Sure helped that all of those assholes were living high on the hog taking out home equity lines of credit and draining any money they may have had in their house and spending like fiends via credit cards.  I think that's why 99% of Bush's supporters think he was awesome.  Hell, I think that's why 99% of the GOP base thinks Bush was awesome.  They were living in a Ponzi scheme with a God-fearing, Jesus loving nut in the White House.

 

Poor people though?  Fuck them.  They don't even have the small bit of money it takes to be financially irresponsible!

 

I think I've banged this drum here a couple of times, but I blame us--the citizens of this country--for everything that befell us between 2000 and 2008 more than I blame Bush.  We had a chance to get out in 2004, but we had to vote for a guy we'd want to have a beer and go to Church with, not some fag from MA who was competent but spoke French.

 

 

If reports are to be believed, he stood up to Cheney, who was hell-bent on starting a war with Iran.

Jesus, that's right...

 

Bush's legacy? Preventing WWIII.

 

It's really easy to demonize Dubya and as he was POTUS, the blame for all the shit that happened while he was in office should squarely fall on his shoulders but, I think that the real blame needs to fall on the circle of people that put him in a chair that he was so clearly unqualified for. (an understatement)

 

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rove, Rice, some members of the SCOTUS, et al....hell, I think Colin Powell needs to share a huge amount of blame, although I get a sense that he knows he fucked up by supporting their bullshit. (IMO, he should have resigned and if he really wants to clear his conscience, he'd publicly voice the dirt on the others)

 

These are the real culprits behind the fuckups...Bush was just the patsy...the public shield for the others to hide their immoral acts behind.

 

Not to say that the republican electorate doesn't share a huge amount of blame..they do..but the level of ignorance amongst Bush supporters was/is pretty high, so it's hard to really be angry at them...

 

I agree with others here that thanks to Bush presidency, the core of the GOP has been shown to be quite rotten and seriously lacking as far as forward thinking goes. This will hopefully sink in with the American populace but, there are alot of people in this country that have convinced themselves that the rotten fruit still tastes good despite seeing the worms crawling around.

 

 

I think the word 'passion' should be replaced with the word 'delusion'

 

There's no doubt that George W's underlings didn't help matters.   One could say that aside from GWB being the worst president, some of his cabinet members could be in the running for worst of their respective offices.   This is especially true of Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, and John Fuckin' Bolten.

 

I will say this about Bush, his commitment towards African aid was pretty good (even if it was a hollow attempt to ensure some sort of positive legacy for himself). From CNN "...total US government development aid to Africa quadrupled from $1.3 billion in 2001 to more than $5 billion in 2008."

I question his motivations....It might have been done in a roundabout way, but I can't help but think this was done to help 'convert the heathens' to the 'correct religion'.

 

Still, "converting" brown people rather than slaughtering them wholesale (as was the style of the time) is at least a step in the right direction.

I often wonder what Bush's presidency (and let's face it, America) would've been like had 9/11 not occurred. Does anyone remember that first year or so, long enough after the Florida debacle, where it seemed like we'd just get a "oh that Bush, nyuck nyuck nyuck, the President's an idiot, ain't it funny?" for the next four years?

He ruined "The Pet Goat" for me.

perhaps, but there does seem to be a good deal of Christian vs. Muslim religious conflict going on in Africa.....

 

hasa diga eebowai

 

 

Bush a lame duck already by August 2001.  9/11 really turned that around.

We had a quaint 7 or 8 months where he was basically just Leno fodder.  I miss those days. 

 

 

And how...

It's amazing how much damage can be done to a planet by just a small group of assholes with boxcutters.

Bush probably would have lost to Hillary in 2004 due to a shit economy, and McCain would be running for a second term if 9/11 never happened. 

 

 

   What pisses me off most about Bush was how bad he really was on terrorism.  

*He ignored the pre 9/11 intelligence. He even said,"I don't swat flies," after getting the report.

*Sat there with his thumb up his ass when he heard the second plane hit the second tower.

*Let Bin Laden get away in Tora Bora

*Said he wasn't "concerned" about Bin Laden. For some reason this was never reported by the "Liberal media"

*Raised the terror alert whenever he wanted a distraction.

 

   Yet protecting America was considered his strong point. The theme of the  2004 GOP Convention was how great Bush was on 9/11. His presidency proves the phrase, what comes around goes around, is a meaningless cliche.

There's an old saying that great events make great men. What made Lincoln was fighting the Civil War ending slavery and reuniting the country, FDR getting our economy back in shape and winning WWII making our country the undisputed and than you look at what JFK did during the Cuban Missle Crisis and preventing nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union.

 

Now with Bush he did a very good job after 9/11 but soon it became obvious that they turned a tragic event into a glorified photo op and gave his administration the ammunation to topple Saddam in Iraq. Also the events after Iraq and Afghanistan showed Bush and his cabinet had no clue how to run a country and only idea was to divide everyone and to rule like a glorified dictatorship through fear. I blame Cheney and Rove for this but occurred under W's leadership so has to own up for it.

 

My last thought is that Bush really was never meant to be president and would have been a one term president. But 9/11 made his presidency except for us he might have wounded this country in a deep way that we won't recover for awhile by increasing the split between all of us and don't let me get started on his economic polices! The truth about Bush is he's probably a great guy but as a president was probably the most dangerous ever and set us back hundreds of years in just 8 years, but in the end I don't blame him he was an adequate southern governor in a position he was never meant for. I blame the people who installed him in power and the people who voted for him.

What killed me about Bush is the absolutely shameless, Orwellian levels of propaganda and willful blind spots surrounding him. For five years we heard seemingly nothing but praise and justification for this asshole, with the right-wing media working overtime to convince us how wonderful his administration was. To say nothing of the "if you question him, it's because you want the terrorists to win" mentality. Never mind the rest of the country, there were plenty of Republicans who knew this guy was a total dud, but the entered into one of the creepiest, Kool-aid sucking states of denial I've ever seen for the good of their party. These people would have insisted the sky was green if that was the Republican party line. And these were not stupid people, despite what you may want to believe. I spent a lot of time hanging out on conservative message boards during the Bush years to try and understand the mentality. While there were plenty of sub-humans, there were some that actually engaged me in debate, and it was obvious that they were smart people who were lying to themselves about Bush and the GOP. The simple fact is, the Republicans became politically mighty over the last couple of decades by moving in lockstep support of their candidates, and during the Bush years they tried to keep this going against every common-sense tendency in their bodies.

 

And they did, in fact, manage to get Bush over the finish line, but (to continue the analogy) at the cost of having the wheels fall off and the engine explode as soon as they'd done so. I swear you could feel the mass unpuckering of Republican sphincters in late 2006, after it stopped being necessary to pretend that Bush was awesome. At which point they tried to go into a combination ignore/repudiate mode ("Bush was never a real conservative", said the people who would have called you a traitor for not voting for him in 2004) but it just didn't work. People were tired of believing six impossible things before breakfast every day, they saw another four years of it coming up with Palin, and it was too much for them. The Tea Party was a good try (being the opposition always makes it easier to promote all the wonderful things you WOULD do but can't) but again, these guys succeeded too fast, got into Congress, and proved themselves to be an even bigger debacle, and all the wind went out of the movement. The cognitive dissonance has become too much for most people, especially now with Bin Laden dead, the economy improving, and not much to be immediately terrified about (just, y'know, the usual long-term things). The current GOP meltdown has been a LONG time coming, and it has its roots in the Bush era. As much as he fucked things up, I can't help thinking we're going to see the political pendulum swing back for a nice, long arc to the left, thanks mostly to what an obvious disaster he was.

To get the full picture on Bush & the horrendous Iraq debacle, Charles Ferguson's No End In Sight is the best documentary on the subject. It's available in it's entirety on Google video: No End In Sight (2007) [part 1 of 3]

 

The shameless mismanagement by Bush & his cabinet in those first few years of the invasion is criminal. At best.

 

Another funny sign of the times was how Timothy Bottoms went from the pre-9/11 comedy That's My Bush to playing Bush in a dramatic TV movie about W's "bravery" during 9/11*.

 

*From the director of BMX Bandits, no less!

Edited by Art Decade - 2/9/12 at 12:48pm

Ah, the Uniter and the Decider.

 

Way back in 2006 -- 2006! -- WaPo stirred the pot by publishing 5 op-eds by noted historians that all discussed whether he already was the worst president in U.S. history. As a time capsule, it's fascinating to revisit them, especially in light of the financial disasters yet to come.

 

Vincent J. Cannato: Time's On His Side -- "Today's pronouncements that Bush is the 'worst president ever' are too often ideology masquerading as history." Ironically, that about sums up Cannato's limp defense of the President.

 

Michael Lind: He's Only Fifth Worst -- Behind #1 James Buchanan, #2 Andrew Johnson, #3 Richard Nixon, and #4 James Madison.

 

Douglas Brinkley: Move Over, Hoover -- Nixon and Harding at the bottom of the list, Bush ties Hoover.

 

David Greenberg: At Least He's Not Nixon -- Bush's pretty bad, but "he hasn't surpassed the master."

 

Eric Foner: He's The Worst Ever -- The worst stuff by his worst predecessors, Bush did even worse.

+1

 

"No End In Sight" will make you so angry at the gargantuan levels of incompetence that occurred that your head may go all "Scanners"

   

 

In all seriousness, as a trusted friend and neighbour, the ultimate reason I'm hacked off is that our current PM and government took the lessons, people and training of the Bush administration to heart in order to launch their own conservative reformation up here in Canada.

The deviousness, outright stupidity, uplifting of incompetents, narrow minded righteousness and hyper-partisanship is now up here in full fledged glory.

And, as your brilliant example demonstrated, enough of the population will unhinge their jaws to swallow it whole to put these people in power.

I was never more disappointed in the Canadian people as when Stephen Harper got his majority government.

Dumbass.

Yup. In a landslide that disembowelled the other parties and will force them to form an alliance (fat chance) to have any chance in the next election.

 

Wait just a minute, Canada. You guys can't be taking cues from the Bush Administration. For some of us, we still look at your country as some sort of exit strategy should Romney or Gingrich manage to win in November.

I don't think I could recall an election where I was more pissed,depressed, angry and crushed than the 2004 election. Took me weeks to get over that bit of depression. Makese wonder if that happemed.to Republicans in '08?

You should stop that. It's a bad habit Americans have had for a while now. We don't have the same level of fundamentalism that runs through American conservative politics (though it is out there in some places) but we can be very conservative without even realizing it. Among other things, Harper's government were lapdogs to the Bush administration (we lucked out in that he wasn't in charge during the launch of the Iraq war, or we absolutely would have been sucked into that quagmire), we've got a pretty cruddy record on privacy rights (I believe Amnesty International actually ranked us lower than the US), and our environmental track record in the last decade is absolutely appalling, despite the fact that most Canadians claim the environment is a major priority. Harper has, to our eternal shame, been a major factor in sabotaging the Kyoto talks and other attempts to deal with global warming--this is because the Alberta oil sands are a major factor in our economy, and the US needs us to keep it up, so don't count on Obama pressuring us to quit it. And that's the other thing, Canadians spend so much time pointing south and going "ha ha, those wacky Americans" that we've become blind to our own creeping conservativism. Harper at least is a canny politician and a cold-blooded customer (seriously, I think he's some kind of reptile), so he doesn't make a fool of himself in the media. Which lets him get away with more.

 

One thing I'll give Canada, the system is set up such that it's harder for him to do a lot of damage. And for various reasons Harper keeps basically pulling the plug on governmental sessions whenever he gets into trouble, which means a lot of his lousy legislation has to get junked and start from scratch (kind of a long story). But now that he's got a majority we may be boned. I expect our economy, which coasted through the recession pretty well due to safeguards put in place by previous, more left-wing governments, will start to flag soon, and the social safety net is going to get chipped away at.

 

The main hope for Canada is that the actual culture is far more reasonable and moderate. Conservatives HAVE run into trouble, for instance, trying to make gay marriage into an issue, and any hint of damaging our health care system tends to cost them politically. As long as America is there to act as a model to be avoided, they can't push too far to the right.

 

George W. Bush's legacy: keeping Canadian conservatives in check.

 

"These Isis guys aren't playing around...they just shot a black guy...I know, right? Welcome to America".

 

“I bet you never played hockey, huh? Probably too busy running around and shooting black guys.” 

 

In Bush 1's last budget year, the deficit rose by $400million. In Clinton's last budget year, the deficit ---shrank--- by $23million. In Bush2's last budget year, the deficit rose by $700million.

 

They need a rating system like the Quarterback Rating in football, where just throwing the ball directly into the ground every time nets you 40 points. Bush2 would have a rating below 40.

 

"Hello?"

 

"So, listen to this! I'm at this big meeting the other day & I'm giving this woman a massage..."

 

"A massage...?"

 

"Right! And she completely loses it! What am I, the elephant man? I was just being folksy!"

 

"I don't know, Georgie boy, that sounds a little more rapey than folksy..."

 

"You tell George that he needs to learn to keep his hands to himself!"

 

"Elaine says you should keep your hands to yourself."

 

"You know my buddy Bob Sacamano once felt up Margaret Thatcher!"

 

"What..?"

 

"Well, that's how the Falklands War got started! He later said he regretted it."

Edited by Art Decade - 2/11/12 at 9:44am

Don't take away the only fun we have between hockey seasons!

 

Seriously though, very true. Glass houses and all.

 

Everyone I've asked (especially women!) finds Stephen Harper "creepy" or "robotic". But come election day they just shrugged and voted for whichever local candidate promised to take one less penny out of their paycheque. Voter apathy is the real national sport up here.

I had forgotten the Merkel massage incident. I absolutely abhor the game I am about to play, I think it's cheap and speculative, but I am going to play it any way.

 

Can you imagine the absolute FUROR over this if it was President Obama?