Only Six Months To Go

In six long months, the most disastrous presidency in American history will come to a close, though the damage will last for decades, perhaps generations.

As George W. Bush rides off into the sunset on his high horse, leaving behind a country drained by six years of war, an economy in shambles, and a Constitution put through the shredder, I thought I’d offer him some unsolicited advice on what he can do with his free time. By his own account he expects to make a ton of dough giving speeches, but maybe first he should, in some small way, atone for his many sins.

First, I suggest he grab a shovel, a hammer and some nails and go to New Orleans’s Ninth Ward and help clean up the mess his incompetent, indifferent leadership in the wake of Katrina helped to create, or at least helped to prolong for years after the event.

Then, I suggest he and former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other members of the administration tour carnivals around the country and do a water boarding act so we can see for ourselves what they’ve been telling us all along: that water boarding isn’t torture.

After the tour, the president should take a metal detector and spend a few months in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. Like our troops, he should ride in an unprotected Humvee and inadequate body armor. When he comes back he should spend an hour with every family who has lost a child in Iraq, and another with every soldier suffering grievous wounds, physical or psychological, fighting the war over those weapons of mass destruction. To each of them he should say, simply, “I’m sorry. I ask for your forgiveness.”

After he apologizes to those soldiers and families, it will be time for his trans-arctic swim, now possible because of the melting of the polar ice cap. From the top of the world he can explain why his administration silenced the government’s own scientists on global warming, spent seven years denying the problem even existed, and the next year proposing woefully inadequate solutions that were music to the ears of the big energy companies.

When he dries off, it will time for the president to don all that fighter-pilot gear he wore on the USS Lincoln when he declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, and scour the mountains near Tora Bora for Osama bin Laden who slipped from our grasp because Bush tried to sub-contract out his killing or capture, then took his eye off the ball and blustered and lied his way into Iraq.

When the ex-president returns from Afghanistan, he should pump gas at a Texas service station for a spell and explain to average Americans why the price of a barrel of oil went from about $30 when he became president to more than $130 today. Does it have anything to do with his energy policy?

When he recovers from the wounds suffered at the hands of angry motorists, he can visit a senior center and explain why people (not just seniors) who invested their retirement savings in the stock market (an idea he touted in his failed plan to privatize social security) have seen the Dow Jones Industrial Average rise about 8% (that’s a total, not an annual return) over the eight years of his presidency when historical averages would have brought a total return of nearly 100%. He can also explain how his tax cuts, a third of which went to the top 1% of taxpayers, have led us to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars from Japan and China to keep our government, and our wars, running. While he’s at it maybe he can explain why the U.S. dollar is worth less than a Canadian dollar. Does any of this have anything to with his economic policies?

And finally, Mr. Bush should go duck hunting with Dick Cheney so he knows what it’s been like to be an average American during his reign.