I know, it's over a month ago!
But these blog posts take hours to write & edit, and I don't always have the time! Today I do!
Plus, it's easier to write legacy post after it's over than just before it's over like many pundits did!
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What is the legacy of President George W. Bush?
Like many presidents, some of his decisions benefited the USA, while others were counter-productive and made some things worse!
Many on the Radical Left think of Bush as the root of all evil in the world! That's ridiculous!
While Bush made some wrong decisions, he's not the root of all evil in the world. In fact, he attempted to protect us from the real evil of the world -- people like Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong Il.
Let's go over the many aspects of the George W. Bush presidency
1)War on Terror
Many on the Radical Left blame 9/11 on Bush! It would've happened no matter who was president. After all, terrorist incidents happened in the Clinton years too!
But it's got nothing to do with Clinton or Bush!
There are people out there who want to inflict terror on this world.
A lot of those people are Radical Muslims!
They want the whole world to submit to their ultra-conservative Islam, and if it means using extreme violence, they'll do it and they did it!
Attacking Al Qaida bases in Afghanistan showed the world that we refuse to be submissive & soft in the face of Radical Islamic terror!
While the federal government was unable to stop the 9/11 attacks, it was able to protect us from extra terrorist attacks since then! Let's give Bush at least some credit here!
From Thomas Sowell
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell011609.php3
President Bush's number one achievement was also the number one function of government— to protect its citizens. Nobody on September 11, 2001 believed that there would never be another such attack for more than seven years.
Unfortunately, people who are protected from dangers often conclude that there are no dangers. This is most painfully visible among those Americans who are hysterical over the government's intercepting international phone calls, in order to disrupt international terrorist networks.
2) The war on Iraq
While Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, there was a concern that Hussein wanted to violently retaliate against the US for kicking Iraqi troops out of Kuwait back in 1991!
This isn't Bush/Cheney paranoia, this was also a concern to Bill Clinton as well. It's just that Clinton wasn't going to attack Iraq unless it did something to the US again!
George W. Bush didn't want to take that risk!
However, mistakes were made!
Within George W. Bush's administration, there were disagreements about how to do it!
Collin Powell said we would need a large amount of troops to invade, then keep the peace after the fall of Hussein! Eric Shinseki said the same thing to Congress!
However, Donald Rumsfeld said we didn't that many troops in Iraq to get the job done!
Unfortunately, Bush took the advice of Rumsfeld instead of Powell.
So while overthrowing Hussein was easy, keeping the peace was difficult. The Sunnis & Shiites were fighting over control of Iraq. Meanwhile, militants from outside of Iraq were pouring in! It got to the point where people thought the USA would loose Iraq like it did in Vietnam!
Bush realized too late that Powell & Shinseki were right all along! Bush should've sent an overwhelming force in the beginning to keep things under control!
It was only in late 2006 when Bush decided to have a "surge" in the amount of US troops in Iraq! That dramatically improved the situation in Iraq!
Too bad it didn't happen earlier, or lives would've been saved!
It would've also made stabilizing Afghanistan easier had the surge in Iraq happened earlier!
For more read:
Condi On the Record
Barack Obama is lucky he isn't inheriting Saddam Hussein.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904339882300339.html?mod=rss_Potomac_Watch
3) Hurricane Katrina
While Bush was facing controversy and dwindling support over his Iraqi strategy, it wasn't enough for Kerry to defeat Bush in 2004!
However, in the following year, a storm hit Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama! It was Hurricane Katrina.
The emergency response was slow and people were dying. Images were broadcast worldwide!
This is what even former Bush advisers said damaged Bush's legacy forever!
And for the ultimate kill, rapper Kanye West said "George Bush doesn't care about black people"! It was an inaccurate statement, but many people went along with it, and Bush's public support never recovered!
The failure in the recovery after Hurricane Katrina was NOT due to racism. People of various racial groups were dying! The failure from Bush was 1) hiring inexperienced people to run FEMA, and 2) being slow to understand that the hurricane hitting New Orleans comes with worse PR than a hurricane hitting Florida
Bush's hiring of Micheal Brown to run FEMA was one of the worst decisions any President could make. Brown had ZERO experience in dealing with a massive natural disaster! Managing an emergency response to a major natural disaster is a high-stress job that requires knowing what to do, making fast decisions, and knowing who needs what! This was something Brown never experience before running FEMA!
Choosing someone to run FEMA shouldn't be based on political connections. It should be based on experience in saving massive amounts of lives after a major emergency! This is the one mistake Bush would never recover from!
Meanwhile, had the hurricane hit Florida, it wouldn't come with the same PR embarrassments as if it hit Louisiana. Florida, despite whatever flaws it may have, doesn't have the level of corruption & government incompetence that was common in Louisiana.
Florida has been hit by so many hurricanes, that the state government has many people experienced in dealing with such things!
However,the state government of Louisiana and city government of New Orleans has been corrupt for decades. People are hired more based on political connections rather than competence! This has been true no matter what political party has been running Louisiana!
Louisiana also had corrupt law enforcement, high poverty and high crime rate! Helping this state recover from a hurricane is more chaotic than helping Florida!
So massive mistakes were also made @ the city and state level when it came to helping New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina!
There were school buses that were in the parking lot sitting un-used! The mayor could've ordered them to be used to evacuate people! HE DIDN'T DO SO! The mayor later regretted not doing so!
But because the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans were both Democrats, they didn't get a strong backlash that Bush got!
Also, because the mayor of New Orleans is of African-American ancestry, Kanye West didn't go after him like he did Bush!
Look, the people at all 3 levels (city,state, federal) all needed to be held responsible for the failure of the recovery of New Orleans!
Another hurricane hit New Orleans in 2008, while the governor was different, the mayor & president were the same as in 2005. While the damage wasn't so bad, the mayor and the president were able to learn from experience and managed the recovery better this time!
Meanwhile, Kentucky recently suffered a snow storm!
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131528.html
The ice storm that slammed the American mid-south in the last weekend of January and then moved onward to the East Coast has left an estimated 1.3 million people without power. And nowhere was hit harder than Kentucky, where some 700,000 people lost electricity and 24 deaths were attributed to the storm. Yet President Barack Obama only declared the state a major disaster area this week. What took so long? Where is the presidential compassion for the victims of this tremendous disaster?
The answer is that nothing is wrong and President Obama surely feels for each and every person hurt or put out by the storm. The reality is that even after the emergency management reforms allegedly implemented after Hurricane Katrina, help from far-off Washington still does little in times of fast-moving crisis. This view may be heresy in the age of federal bailouts, but it is still true.
4) The Economy
Many on the Left blamed the economic downfall on Bush!
But was it all Bush's fault? Maybe some of it was, but the Democrats aren't blameless!
Remember back in 2001, everyone thought the economy would die after 9/11. It actually recovered.
It wasn't until 2007-2008 when the economy went down again!
Part of it was rising oil prices (many Democrats didn't want to help the supply part by increasing offshore drilling, the same thing done in liberal European countries like the UK & Norway), rising food prices (caused partially by Midwest politicians of both parties demanding the corn supply be funnelled from the food supply to ethanol supply)!
But what really killed the economy was the housing & investment bubbles bursting!
Part of the reason many real estate related business went down was because many liberal Democrats in Congress pressured them to give loans to people who otherwise wouldn't be eligible for them!
Look, in most cases, when banks lend $$$, they want to make those receiving the loan can pay it back! Otherwise, the bank looses $$$! This is basic economics.
But in the so-called interest of so-called "social justice", many Democrats wanted Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other mortgage lenders to lend more $$$ to low-income people. However, those same low-income people couldn't re-pay those loans. Because of that, many of them got kicked out of their houses that they just moved in, houses they couldn't afford in the first place!
After the housing bubble bursts, many conservative & libertarian pundits pointed out too many loans were being given to those who couldn't afford them. Many liberal pundits abused the race card by calling those non-leftist pundits "racists"!
Look, what I consider racist, is conning thousands of ethnic minorities into taking loans they couldn't afford. What I also consider racist is covering up for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac until it was too late! That's what Congressional Democrats like Chris Dodd & Barney Frank did!
So what did Bush do? He tried to something about The failures of Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, but was blocked the mostly Democrat Congress!
From former Bush advisor Karl Rove
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123137220550562585.html
Some critics blame Mr. Bush because he supported broadening homeownership. But Mr. Bush's goal was for people to own homes they could afford, not ones made accessible by reckless lenders who off-loaded their risk to GSEs.
The housing meltdown is largely a story of greed and irresponsibility made possible by government privilege. If Democrats had granted the Bush administration the regulatory powers it sought, the housing crisis wouldn't be nearly as severe and the economy as a whole would be better off.
4) Race Relations
Back to Kanye West's nonsense comment "George Bush doesn't care about black people".
I already noted that the crappy emergency response had A LOT to do with the incompetence of city/state/federal emergency response officials. It has NOTHING to with "racism".
Someone should ask Kanye West which president hired USA's first 2 secretary of states of African-American ancestry? Answer: George W. Bush
Bush trusted the USA's national security & diplomatic powers to Collin Powell and Condaleeza Rice. In other words, Bush trusted 2 African-Americans with our national security!
This is the total opposite of what Kanye West thinks!
Bush also hired a Mexican-American to run the Justice Department, Asian-Americans to run our Transportation & Labor Department!
In fact, Bush tried to help the Republican Party reach out to non-whites!
Bush's experience as the governor of Texas informed him that the Republican Party can't survive much longer if it's just a "white man's party"! While Texas is known for having many evangelical Christians, energy sector workers and gun-owners (all of which makes Texas mostly Republican). Bush understood that the Republicans shouldn't alienate the state's growing Mexican-American population!
During the 1990's, the California Republicans tried to gain support by riling up anti-Mexican immigrant sentiments. They shot themselves in the foot because though they won in 1994, it only motivated many Latino non-voters into becoming voters, and motivated Latino immigrants to finally take their US citizenship tests! This hurt the California Republics BIG TIME!
Bush understood that immigrant bashing is a bad strategy in the long-run! He wanted to modernize the Republican Party by welcoming non-whites instead of bashing them!
Back in 2000, Bush tried to increase the support of non-whites! He not only reached out to Latinos, he also recruited African-American preachers to recruit African-Americans, and made the Republican convention more diverse.
While Bush was unsuccessful in getting major African-American support in 2000, and it only increased in tiny amounts in 2004, he had a lot more success in gaining Latino voters. Bob Dole only 21% Latino support in 1996. Bush got 35% in 2000 and 45% in 2004!
However, in 2007 some Republicans still wanted to bash immigrants for votes! McCain took the Bush route and was pro-immigration!
However, the economic downturn in 2008 made voters of all races reluctant to support the Republicans, so McCain only got 35% Latino support as well as 35% Asian support!
5) "Morality Issues"
Issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and drug policy is what keeps me from being a Republican, even though I defended Bush on other issues!
I think abortion is a personal decision, and government should stay out of it! Bush interfered too much on this issue!
While Bush didn't say anything viciously anti-gay like many in his party did, I still think his "marriage should be between a man & a woman" to be condescending!
As for drug policy, his militaristic policy on illegal drugs, while no different from Bill Clinton's policy, is counter-productive.
While marijuana does have side effects and shouldn't be sold to minors, some people have benefited from the pain-relieving effects! I think adults should decide for themselves what side effects they can risk!
I think the feds using major artillery against marijuana growers is stupid and counter-productive! Obama hinted at changing this, but so far, hasn't used his speaking talents on this issue!
Also, Bush's militaristic drug war alienated many in Latin America, helping the cause of leftist leaders like Evo Morales of Bolivia. While I think Morales is too socialist, he had a point in mentioning that the US sponsorship of using heavy artillery against cocoa growers made the situation worse!
6) Size of Government
It grew under Bush, who claimed to be for smaller government!
His bailouts has only encouraged Obama to make more bailouts, more deficit spending!
If Bush believed in smaller government, he should've expressed his thoughts on this more! But I guess the red states are just as dependent on government spending as blue states. The red states just want government spending to come with religious rhetoric, whereas blue states want government spending to come with secular rhetoric!
For more read
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131264.html
George W. Bush has certainly taught us that government really can't be trusted to be very effective, or open, or smart. He has also taught us that government can always get bigger on every level and every way. It's a sad lesson that we'll be learning for many years to come.
Meanwhile, liberals would be happpy when a president spends more tax $$$ on AIDS relief, education, and Medicare, right? Bush DID ALL OF THAT AND MORE!
7) Conclusion
There's a lot more that could be written about the George W. Bush presidency.
While he made some serious mistakes, I don't think he's the "root of all evil"! I came to the same conclusion at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency and I'll most likely say the same thing if I live to see the end of Barack Obama's presidency!
