George Bush: Presidential Failure

Criteria in deciding whether a president is a success or a failure are disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. George Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has stumbled badly in every one of these key areas.

I am astonished that so many people still support a president who has:

• Presided over the loss of approximately three million American jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.
  
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• Over seen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover's.
  
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• Taken, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, the greatest worldwide outpouring of goodwill the United States has enjoyed at least since World War II and squandered it by insisting on pursuing a foolish go-it-almost-alone invasion of Iraq, thereby transforming almost universal support for the United States into worldwide condemnation.
  
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• Misled (to use the most charitable word and interpretation) the American public about weapons of mass destruction and supposed ties to Al Qaeda in Iraq and so into a war that has plainly (and entirely predictably) made us less secure, caused a boom in the recruitment of terrorists, is killing American military personnel needlessly, and is threatening to suck up all our available military forces and be a bottomless pit for the money of American taxpayers for years to come.
  
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• Failed to follow through in Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda are regrouping, once more increasing the threat to our people.
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• Insulted and ridiculed other nations and international organizations and now has to go, hat in hand, to those nations and organizations begging for their assistance.
  
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• Completely miscalculated or failed to plan for the personnel and monetary needs in Iraq after the war, so that he sought and obtained an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq, a sizable chunk of which is going, without competitive bidding to Haliburton, the company formerly headed by his vice president.
  
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• Inherited an annual federal budget surplus of $230 billion and transformed it into a $500+ billion deficit in less than three years. This negative turnaround of three-quarters of a trillion dollars is totally without precedent in our history. The ballooning deficit for fiscal 2004 is rapidly approaching twice the dollar size of the previous record deficit, $290 billion, set in 1992, the last year of the administration of President Bush's father and, at almost 5 percent of GDP, is closing in on the percentage record set by Ronald Reagan in 1986.
  
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• Cut taxes three times, sharply reducing the burden on the rich, reclassified money obtained through stock ownership as more deserving than money earned through work. The idea that dividend income should not be taxed-what might accurately be termed the unearned income tax credit-can be stated succinctly: "If you had to work for your money, we'll tax it; if you didn't have to work for it, you can keep it all."
  
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• Severely curtailed the very American freedoms that our military people are supposed to be fighting to defend. ("The Patriot Act," one historian noted, "is the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams.")
  
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• Called upon American armed service people, including Reserve forces, to sacrifice for ever-lengthening tours of duty in a hostile and dangerous environment while he rewards the rich at home with lower taxes and legislative giveaways and gives lucrative no-bid contracts to American corporations linked with the administration.
  
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• Given an opportunity to begin to change the consumption-oriented values of the nation after September 11, 2001, when people were prepared to make a sacrifice for the common good, called instead of Americans to 'sacrifice' by going out and buying things.
  
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• Proclaimed himself to be a conservative while maintaining that big government should be able to run roughshod over the Bill of Rights, and that the government must have all sorts of secrets from the people, but the people can be allowed no privacy from the government.
  
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Never before have we seen Presidential Failure on this scale. Each president, before, that has been considered a failure had at least prevailed in one area of the criteria. Bush, has prevailed in Zero.

I appreciate passion and patriotism. I feel those things too. But we're talking about judging the Presidential Administration of the last 8 years. Just as every president in history has been judged to either be a successful president or a failure.

We can not post passionately about one item (The War in Iraq) of this presidency and claim him to be a successful President based on that. It is just simple fact that our childrens children will be in American History, or Government class reding that George W. Bush's was a weak president.