George W. Bush was a Terrible President

George Bush bashed Barack Obama recently in a meeting with rich donors.  Obama has earned all the bashing we can dish out.  He's been a horrible president and the nation is worse off for having elected him, but we can say the same of Bush.

George Bush was a horrible president

As conservatives we must embrace this truth if we are going to chide liberals over their irrational Obama worship. More importantly, we must face this truth for our own intellectual integrity, for the future of the Republican party, and most importantly, the future of our nation.

George Bush broke the Middle East

Granted, Obama and his Sophomore Girls Warlord Club have since broken the pieces into even smaller pieces and then set all them on fire, but Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld dealt the initial blow.

The Iraq Invasion was a Catastrophic Blunder

How could adults like Cheney and Rumsfeld think such an adventure would turn out well? Did they not foresee the consequences of taking out the firewall that protected the greater Middle East from Iran? Did they really think the Iraqis would embrace us, throw rose petals at our feet? Did they truly believe they could transform Iraq into the Germany of the Middle East? Were they snookered by Achmed Chalabi? Was there corporate money involved? Is it really that simple?

These questions disturb me because I had a naive confidence in Cheney and Rumsfeld. They were old hands who knew their way around, and were supposedly wise and conservative.  I knew Bush was inexperienced in foreign policy, but I believed he was sincere. This disaster they authored makes me question everything, because they fracked the world and we are still feeling the tectonic aftershocks.

I could go down a similar list for Afghanistan, but why bother? They thought they could remake an ancient society? History shows that even the fairly modest idea of imposing a simulacrum of control over Afghanistan is folly. Why did they do it? Perhaps it really was about oil and gas pipelines.

Bush Tried, People Died

Finally, and sadly, hundreds of thousands of lives, families, communities, people, will never be the same because of what Bush-Cheney did. I have friends who are not right and never will be again because of what they saw and did over there.   Bush pardoned drug dealers at the end of his presidency, but refused the same clemency to soldiers jailed for trumped-up, bs 'war crimes.'

And in the irony of ironies forged in hell, uber-Christian George W. Bush is responsible for the persecution, rape, murder and displacement of the Levant's Christians, besieged on all sides thanks to his criminally naive notion that he could remake that region.

Bush Crashed the Economy

We also cannot forget that Bush-Cheney and their merry band of Wall Street pirates crashed the economy in 2008, and Bush went on TV and explained to us how Dirty Hank Paulson had to blow a hole in the side of the treasury so the High Finance Looters and dirty banksters could refill their pockets.

Heimatlandsicherheit

Bush-Cheney also gave us the liberty-suck known as the Patriot Act, brought us the bloated, groping bureaucracy known as Department of Homeland Security, and introduced the nazi-esque "Homeland" into common parlance. And speaking of that, over 3,000 people died on 9/11 and nobody got fired.

Another fallout not generally acknowledged is how much information we are now sharing, about military operations, intelligence, etc.  Our government is stupid and broken, and Bush-Cheney-Rumsefeld broke it.

We have become complacent and we cut our politicians way too much slack. If we cannot hold our politicians up to scrutiny, even those we voted for and may have liked at one time, then we are finished as a people and a nation.