Please cut the crap, Bill Kristol. I know you're a right wing apologist, but that doesn't mean you get to make shit up.
The horrible thing is, this looks to be a SERIES of articles, meant to assure us that george W. Bush is one hell of a president. Let's take a look at the highlights point by point, shall we?
Link: Why Bush Will Be A Winner - washingtonpost.com.
I suppose I'll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one.
We'll start with this one. If Bush's term is considered "successful" by anyone, that means a future president will emulate it. If Mr. Kristol can sit there and tell me that ANYONE would want to emulate the last 6 1/2 years, he is a master at lying with a straight face.
I didn't agree with Ronald Reagan's policies or politics, but I have to admit that the public respected him, at least for the first six years. And as a politician, he had a pragmatic streak that made him realize where the line was, and that he couldn't cross it, no matter what his personal politics told him. That is the mark of a leader, whether you like him or not.
George W. Bush has no such pragmatic skills. He is not a leader; he's a de facto dictator. Almost 1000 bills have been signed, which bear a "signing statement," almost all of which attempt to carve out exceptions to the law for himself. Then there's Iraq. A successful leader would never have gone in without having a complete plan for what to do once he got there, and a plan for getting out.
This is not only not a successful president; he is the worst president in history. Of course, that doesn't stop Kristol from spinning thustly:
The economy first: After the bursting of the dot-com bubble,
followed by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we've had more than five
years of steady growth, low unemployment and a stock market recovery.
Did this just happen? No. Bush pushed through the tax cuts of 2001 and
especially 2003 by arguing that they would produce growth. His
opponents predicted dire consequences. But the president was
overwhelmingly right. Even the budget deficit, the most universally
criticized consequence of the tax cuts, is coming down and is lower
than it was when the 2003 supply-side tax cuts were passed.
If Kristol can't see the "dire consequences," he needs his eyes checked. Unemployment is actually far higher than it was when Bush took office. It's stayed steady, but a whole lot more people are underemployed than before. More people are working for small companies at low pay and no benefits, because more and more companies are downsizing here and moving overseas. They had to tighten bankruptcy laws in order to reduce the number of bankruptcies, the foreclosure rate is skyrocketing due to a proliferation of mortgage schemes better suited to organized crime than legitimate bankers (honestly, not started under the Bushies, but encouraged by them), and the only thing keeping the economy afloat at all is an incredible amount of deficit spending, and incredible amounts of borrowing from countries that really aren't the best of friends. Hell; the only reason people invested in real estate for a while was because the stock market wasn't going anywhere. Now the stock market is inching up a little, because real estate's tanking. The fed isn't increasing interest rates because of inflation; they're raising them to attract borrowers, because more and more economies are investing in Euros. Since most Americans don't travel overseas much, so they haven't noticed, but the dollar is tanking.
Seriously, It is only possible for puffy rich white guys to think the economy's just super. It's not at all "super." In fact, the next president will have a daunting task ahead just getting the economy back on the rails.
Bush
has also (on the whole) resisted domestic protectionist pressures
(remember the Democratic presidential candidates in 2004 complaining
about outsourcing?), thereby helping sustain global economic growth.
Yeah, how's that working out for us?
First of all, there's little to nothing to "protect." The only thing we make anymore are Japanese cars and iPods. Okay, "make" is kind of a strong word. We actually "assemble" stuff. We've already established that apparently, even with all of those "illegal aliens" just flooding the country to "do jobs Americans won't do," it's still cheaper to outsource our manufacturing elsewhere, because American companies (who are increasingly moving their paper location offshore to avoid taxes) continue to do so. Our pets (my son's cat was one of them!) were put in danger, because we -- the "breadbasket of the world" -- can't even make our own goddamn pet food! I mean, we're even outsourcing the Iraq war, and they tried to hand over our port security to a Middle eastern company suspected to have ties to terrorists.
Seriously; he's not only avoiding "protectionism," he's avoiding protection. But we'll get back to that.
The
year 2003 also featured a close congressional vote on Bush's other
major first-term initiative, the Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Liberals denounced it as doing nothing for the elderly; conservatives
worried that it would bust the budget. Experts of all stripes foresaw
great challenges in its implementation. In fact, it has all gone
surprisingly smoothly, providing broad and welcome coverage for seniors
and coming in under projected costs.
Is he kidding with this? It's the first year, and a significant number of seniors are so confused that they haven't signed up for it yet. And wait until they start figuring out there are limits on coverage, and their coverage runs out before the plan year. And with no cost controls, it's only a matter of time before everyone settles in, and Big Pharma starts gouging again. It's a bad plan, we were lied to, and the actual effects have only just kicked in.
Oh, Kristol's just getting warmed up...
What about terrorism? Apart from Iraq, there has been less of it, here
and abroad, than many experts predicted on Sept. 12, 2001. So Bush and Vice President Cheney probably are doing some important things right. The war in Afghanistan has gone reasonably well.
I don't do drugs, and I don't drink, but if I did, I think I'd want some of whatever Kristol's ingesting.
Overall, terrorist attacks have been UP every year since Bush invaded Iraq. A report released just this last week showed that al Qaeda is stronger than ever, and we're losing soldiers and Iraqi civilians are dying in record numbers due to terrorist attacks.
I'm going to write an article on my other web site on the increase in terrorist activity in the last few years, so here, suffice it to say that William must be doing Kristol meth or something, if he thinks there is less terrorism right now.
As for Afghanistan, that war has been disastrous, as the only portion
of the country the Afghan government controls is Kabul itself, and the
taliban is back and running most of the rest of the country. Meanwhile,
al Qaeda sits on the other side of the border, in pakistan, thumbing
their noses at us, and Osama bin Laden is back to his other career,
making videos.
On foreign policy:
As for foreign policy in general, it has mostly been the usual mixed bag. We've deepened our friendships with Japan and India; we've had better outcomes than expected in the two largest Latin American countries, Mexico and Brazil; and we've gotten friendlier governments than expected in France and Germany. China is stable. There has been slippage in Russia. The situation with North Korea is bad but containable.
Jesus, does this guy even bother to read a newspaper? Our "friendships" with Japan and India are on solid ground and always have been. Have they deepened? Doubtful, unless you've been seeing some serious tongue-kissing going on between Bush and the leaders of those countries. In fact, Japan is considering repealing Article 9 of their Constitution, which forbids them from having a standing army. The reasons are many, but one of them is definitely Bush.
Mexico and Brazil are stable and friendly, why wouldn't we be friendly. Does it take some special skill to maintain relations with friendly countries? Our relationships with France and Germany were severely damaged by the Iraq occupation, however. (Not to mention Bush's fondling of Ms. Merkel.) We're lucky those two countries are capable of realizing the difference between a country and its leadership, and that all countries have occasional electoral brain farts.
Russia, however, is a problem; a huge problem, and Bush and his lame-ass Secretary of State, Ms Condi, are not up to handling it. Ironic, too, since Condi is such an expert. The situation over there has deteriorated significantly, to the point that their democracy is in greater danger than ours. Hold your breath until the next president gets in there...
And I hate to break it to Kristol, but North Korea was not only containable when Bush took office, it was contained. It was Bush that incited the latest round of threats, and activated Kim's Typodong.
It's simple, folks; Kristol's estimation of Bush's foreign policy requires him to ignore Bush's incredible failures in so many other countries. Besides Afghanistan (I'll get to Iraq in a moment), he's also screwed relations in most of the Middle East, most of Europe, Venezuela, Iran... the list is quite long. He has a Secretary of State who would rather buy shoes than do her job, and whom pretty much no one takes seriously. A lot of the crap you hear about her is that many of the countries she has to deal with don't want to deal with women, but for some reason, Madeleine Albright didn't have the same problem.
They have had two successes in 6 years; they managed to squeeze the genie back into the bottle in North Korea, although his ass is still sticking out a bit. And they made a deal with Libya; a deal that Qaddafi himself wanted, because his people were starving to death and about to kill him.
Then there's Iraq. Read what Kristol says about that debacle. Make sure you haven't had lunch.
But wait, wait, wait: What
about Iraq? It's Iraq, stupid -- you (and 65 percent of your fellow
Americans) say -- that makes Bush an unsuccessful president.
Not necessarily. (...) Bush is a war president, and war presidents are judged by whether
they win or lose their war. So to be a successful president, Bush has
to win in Iraq.
Which I now think we can. Indeed, I think we will. In late 2006, I
didn't think we would win, as Bush stuck with the failed
Rumsfeld-Abizaid-Casey strategy of "standing down" as the Iraqis were
able to "stand up," based on the mistaken theory that if we had a
"small footprint" in Iraq, we'd be more successful. With the new
counterinsurgency strategy announced on Jan. 10, backed up by the troop
"surge," I think the odds are finally better than 50-50 that we will
prevail. We are routing al-Qaeda in Iraq,
we are beginning to curb the Iranian-backed sectarian Shiite militias
and we are increasingly able to protect more of the Iraqi population.
If
we sustain the surge for a year and continue to train Iraqi troops
effectively, we can probably begin to draw down in mid- to late 2008.
The fact is that military progress on the ground in Iraq in the past
few months has been greater than even surge proponents like me
expected, and political progress is beginning to follow. Iran is a problem, and we will have to do more to curb Tehran's
meddling -- but we can. So if we keep our nerve here at home, we have a
good shot at achieving a real, though messy, victory in Iraq.
Jeez... where do you start? How about with the fact that WE can't WIN a goddamn civil war between three factions inside Iraq. That would be like the French coming over here to help us during the revolution, and still being here, because they felt like they knew democracy better than we did.
Bush won the war a long time ago. He got rid of Saddam back in 2003, and it took about 6 weeks. It's the aftermath that's complately screwed up. They've had three interim governments since then, all of which had Bushies' hands up their asses, and telling them what to say and do. There has never been a war strategy, and all the surge is going to do is increase the number of targets. A country that had never had terrorism, now has it in spades. The government will now naturally align with Iran, like it or not, because they're Shiites. And we didn't have to train an army; they had a goddamn army, and Bush ordered them disbanded, and outlawed the Baathist Party. And do I have to mention the half TRILLION dollars he's pissed away down that rathole in four years?
Bush is a failure; an absolute failure, and revisionist history won't change that. He's incompetent, he's worthless, he's damaged America's reputation around the world, and he's done more damage to the Constitution than any single figure in our history. We'll be much better off when he leaves.
History will not be kind to George W. Bush, no matter how much revision Kristol plans
.