Let's Admit It: Bush Was a Failure

Your thesis sounds good--until one looks at history.  Who were the greatest presidents?

Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan.  Presidents who won a war when the nation itself was in danger.

Johnson should have been great, but he lost Viet Nam.  Truman gets a split vote for being part of winning WWII but not winning in Korea.  Eisenhower should have gotten a vote because of prosperity and ending the Korean War, but it wasn't a win.  We're still living with the stalemate.

Bush faced an attack on the homeland with casualties similar to Pearl Harbor.  We haven't been hit since.  Iraq might have pulled him down, but it looks like he's going out a winner there.  A messy winner?  Sure.  But so was Lincoln.  Actually, Lincoln was arguably the worst commander-in-chief the nation has ever had.  But, in the end, with U S Grant, he won.

It is war and threat to the nation that determines the greats.  George W. Bush will go down as one of the great presidents for being the first to tackle the terrorist threat in a winning manner.  If Iraq did prove reasonably fatal to Al Qaeda, it will be an underlined win.

All the other matters are, historically speaking, inconsequential--unless this recession turns out to be a 30's type Great Depression which was due primarily to Bush economic policies (and remember that Fannie, Freddie, and loans to people without sufficient equity were Democrat darlings and protected as such). 

Other than Hoover (and Carter--just because he's historically close), which presidents presided over a recession/depression?  That a short list of names doesn't spring to mind shows how inconsequential recessions and depressions usually are (except to the people who live through them).

If President Obama ushers in a period of peace, Bush's legacy will dim.  But, if pressures from Russia, Iran, Korea and China persist, not to mention problems of war in the Middle East, Bush will receive quite nice treatment from historians.

Roberts and Alito were HUGE wins, thanks to the pressure from the Republican grassroots - to which he did, to his credit, respond. 

Dubai Ports was a near-fiasco where he also gets credit for listening to the good counsel of Republican grassroots.  I put talk radio pundits and conservative bloggers into that column along with their audiences and readers, who generated great activity in emails and phone calls to the White House.  We rejected a bad idea of his, and he heard us.

As for Gonzalez, the attorneys he fired were involved in defending ACORN.  I find it exceedingly difficult to hold that against the Bush administration.

Rescinding the Executive Order for Offshore Drilling may have halted the skyrocketing oil future prices that caused great harm to the American people, and certainly set the table for a potential #dontgo success, had all the other stars aligned for Drill Here Drill Now - again, he listened to his grassroots and the Rebel Congress.

Responding to the counsel of McCain and Petraeus on The Surge in Iraq - HUGE.

He consistently implemented a muscular foreign policy and appointed one of my personal heroes, John Bolton, to the U.N., albeit only temporarily.  Well done. 

If you don't believe that the GWOT poses "any conceivable threat to the United States", I recommend you pick up a copy of Richard Miniter's Shadow War:  The Untold Story of How America is Winning the War on Terror (or just click on Google's book preview here).  I also recommend Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. 

The threat to the United States is not solely limited to casualties, in fact the bigger threat was, and probably always will be, to bring down the U.S. economy.  I would imagine that recent events might contribute to us all being able to agree that an economic threat is one of the most effective possible ways to bring this nation to its knees.  The next biggest threat would be a nuclear EMF attack which would render our entire technology infrastructure completely useless, conveniently throwing us all back into the stone age for 3-6 months.  Unless you're a former CIA operative I might question your assurance that suitcase nukes don't exist, but there is no doubt that a rusty barge is capable of launching a portable rocket with a nuclear warhead, not to mention that North Korea's range already reaches to the West Coast.  So while Bush has made some egregious miscalculations and errors during his tenure, the fact that he and his staff have managed the clandestine operations which have kept us safe for the past 8 years is no failure as far as I'm concerned.

If throwing Bush under the bus is the attitude of the NextGen GOP, I'm really disappointed and will be looking forward to the Millenial GOP.  When I look for a new national leader, I certainly won't be looking up to someone who treats Bush the same way John McCain's staff treated Sarah Palin.  George Bush listened to us, he kept us safe and protected Israel,  He's made several significant mistakes - and so did we.  Personal responsibility means we all went astray, not just the leadership that we elected.  I think we should cowboy up to that fact instead trying to run away from it.