George W. Bush: A True American Hero (Not)

Every week for the past two years or so I have obsessively watched George Bush’s poll numbers at http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm, which provides regular updates of all the major polls. I noticed a couple of things. First, typically the poll taken by FOX news showed Bush’s favorability rating a few points higher than most other polls. That’s probably because they polled 1,200 people of whom 1,150 were Sean Hannity who would defend Bush even if he were caught mugging Hannity’s own mother. And we all know what a reputable, fair and balanced news organization FOX is. It speaks volumes about FOX that you can get more reliable information about the world from watching “Family Guy” on FOX than you can by watching any of their so-called newscasts. Second, I noticed no matter how hard FOX tried to give Bush a little nudge up, for the past two years he rarely even hit a 40% favorability rating.

Bush hasn’t been higher than 29%-30% in any poll in recent weeks, and in the most recent L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll his approval rating is at an astonishing 23%, with 73% disapproving of his performance. But to me it isn't astonishing that his poll numbers are so low; it’s astonishing that they're so high! The Bush legacy of incompetence, ignorance and arrogance is by now well–documented, even by his own former press secretary. So what do these 29% (I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on the L.A. Times/Bloomberg numbers) see in Bush?

If you are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan’s first campaign, against the peanut farmer from Georgia, you will recall that Reagan made a lot of hay by asking Americans a simple, if arrestingly self-absorbed question: “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” If the answer was “no,” and it will be recalled that the Carter years were marked by soaring interest rates and high inflation, the suggestion was that you should vote for Reagan.

So, let’s start by asking ourselves the same question: are we better off than we were eight years ago? And let’s look at it the way Republicans look at it, which is to say, from a purely selfish, financial point of view.

The day Bush was sworn in for the first time, after the Supreme Court handed him a presidency he lost fair and square, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stood at 10,587. Historically, the market gains about 8% a year on average, meaning it doubles, again on average, every nine years or so. Which means that had historical averages prevailed, the Dow today would be somewhere in the vicinity of 20,000. It would be up by nearly 100%. Where is it really? Somewhere south of 11,500. In other words, it is up under George Bush by about 10%, or a pathetic 1-2% a year. Consumer confidence is at or near an all time low. Millions are losing their homes. Job growth is nil. Our huge budget deficits are being financed by the Japanese and the Chinese who own many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of U.S. treasuries. A U.S. dollar is now worth less than a Canadian dollar. If you are breathing you know the economy is in the tank, literally. Goodness, when oilman Bush came into office the price of oil was about $20 a barrel. Today? Try $135. Oh, and have you checked the value of your home lately?

Now, I understand the president can't control all economic events, but if Reagan asked the question in 1980, it's fair to ask it again in 2008. And by any measure, the economic life of the average American has suffered mightily under Bush and his master, Dick “Shoot Straight” Cheney. (Hedge fund managers are not, by the way, average Americans.) Remember that for the first six years of the Bush presidency he had a GOP controlled Congress. And what did they do with the budget surplus racked up under Clinton? It’s now a massive deficit to be paid for by our children and grandchildren. They spent like drunken sailors. And this is the party of fiscal discipline? While they were throwing billions at Iraq, most of which went to well-connected private contractors, they told you you could have you cake and eat it, too. They cut taxes to the tune of about $270 billion, of which the richest 1% of Americans got $90 billion, the next 9% got $90 billion, and the rest of us, the bottom 90% got $90 billion. That’s called tax equity.

But, you know, when I ask myself the “are you better off” question, I think of it not just as a money question (I know this is hard for Republicans to wrap their heads around). I think about it in terms of the country my kids are growing up in. Here’s where Bush really shines.

Thousands of young Americans have died in Iraq, not to mention countless Iraqis. It’s now beyond debate that the Bush crowd built a phony case for war. I don’t care how many American flag lapel pins Bush and Cheney wear on their suits, it is unpatriotic and un-American to send kids to die and be maimed in a war you ginned up. It’s even worse to send them to war without the equipment they need and to have them return without adequate health care and other supports they will need, many for the rest of their lives. I don’t care how many American flag lapel pins they pin on their chests, but it is unpatriotic and un-American to expose an undercover CIA agent because her husband presented evidence, now proved correct, that undercut your case for war. I don’t care how many American flag lapel pins they glue to their foreheads, but it is unpatriotic and un-American to sanction torture. Goodness, what kind of America is this? It is an America that is no longer respected in the world, a weakened America that has no moral authority anymore.

Let’s talk about the environment for a minute. Bush/Cheney spent the first seven years of their reign dismissing all the accumulating scientific evidence on climate change, even going so far as to silence some of the government's top climate scientists. (These people have no faith in science, only in their own divine wisdom.) They have spent the last year proposing utterly inadequate measures to deal with what is unquestionably a looming planetary crisis. Modern day Neros, they have fiddled while the planet burned. What a colossal waste of time. The argument always seems to be, we can’t cap carbon emissions because the economy will suffer. Wow. How much worse can it get?

Finally (one could go on for seven or eight years like this because it’s hard to imagine a day that Bush hasn’t inflicted some additional harm on the body politic), there are Bush’s famous signing statements, the ones he attaches to every piece of legislation he intends to ignore – many hundreds of them, far, far surpassing any previous president. Apparently, Bush mistook a 5-4 Supreme Court decision handing him the presidency as a coronation.

If you were to make a list of ways to inflict lasting, grievous damage on the United States of America and its citizens, you would pretty much have a list of what Bush has done with his presidency. And to think a Republican Congress impeached Bill Clinton for...well, you know.

January 20, 2009. It ought to be a day of national celebration – the day the dark cloud that has blotted out the sun that used to shine on America finally moved out to sea. Bush is a national grace and a stain on this good country. Goodbye and good riddance!