An Almost Final Word on George Bush

My almost final word on George Bush is that I didn't have much interest President Bush's fairwell address. I didn't pay attention to the exit interviews either.

When you take away the blundering invasion of Iraq, the economic collapse, the crimes against humanity, and the crimes against competence, George Bush just isn't that interesting.

Ultimately, George Bush has to be seen as a failed president. I believe that historians will find that Bush administration negligence had a substantial role in bringing about 9-11. They'll find that Bush's people viewed the aftermath of 9-11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein and launched a clever campaign to conceal both their war objectives and the fact that the decision was made so early. Given the ideological character of the fight over warrantless wiretapping and torture, there probably won't be much agreement over whether Bush administration figures were war criminals. However, historians will determine that Bush administration economic policies and deregulation mentality hurried along the financial collapse. There isn't much discussion of the effect of the Bush administration on the capacity of American government, but I'm willing to bet that future historians will find that the Bush years resulted in a broad deterioration in the skill level and fundamental competence of the federal government.

In the final analysis, Bush reminds me of Buchanan and Hoover in being a president whose failure is so monumental that he's going to usher in fundamental changes in American government and society. Does that mean that George Bush is the worst president in American history?

Probably not.

It looks like Barack Obama is going to be successful in using the economic stimulus package to push health care reform and jump-start government efforts to promote a transition to a green energy economy.

Those are fundamental changes but are not as far reaching as the Civil War or the New Deal. In this sense, George Bush wasn't as big a failure as Buchanan or Hoover because his failures are not connected with cataclysms like the Civil War or Great Depression.

Here lies the significance of the surge. Because Bush's surge policy in Iraq has been moderately successful, the Obama administration can maintain America's imperial role in the world. The Bush administration really would have been "the worst" is they had failed so badly that the U. S. had to fundamentally change its role in the international system.

But Bush did screw up badly enough to be included in the bottom three.