Post-Inaugural Flashback: 10 Reasons for History to Remember Dubya

In the run-up to the 44th President of the USA, there was a good deal of black comedy in the desperation of some to prevent the 43rd from taking his place in oblivion. From Karl Rove, who may just have been trying to sweep up around his own place in our memories, to Charles Krauthammer, who helped sell the notion of the "unipolar moment" that assisted the Bush Administration in its failed ambitions, to Andrew Roberts, who clung to dreams of American Empire, to Bruce Anderson, who bellowed, "History Will Vindicate Bush", to former Dubya speechwriters, the chant went up: One Day You'll Be Grateful for All He Did.

So, in that spirit, we're pleased to re-print, from AlterNet, Bernie Horn's Top10 Reasons to Remember Dubya.

So Long Worst President Ever; 10 Reasons History Will Hang You



George W. Bush presented his valedictory last night, desperately seeking thanks and congratulations. So here goes: Thanks and congratulations, W, for showing the world that today's conservatism is an abject failure.

Thanks to Bush, we know that conservatives are not fiscally responsible, they are not for small government, they don't stand up for moral values and they won't make Americans one bit safer. Conservatives aren't even true defenders of "free markets" -- having presided over the biggest market bailout in the world.

After eight long years, Bush can no longer fool the public. Polls show that he is the most unpopular president in the history of survey research. When the 2006 and 2008 elections are considered together, Bush policies resulted in the landslide rejection of his party at both the federal and state levels. There are probably a hundred examples where Bush conservatism failed, but let's stick with the top 10.

1. The worst recession since the 1930s. The current recession will be the deepest and longest downturn since the Great Depression. And unlike other recessions, this one was directly caused by conservative anti-regulatory policy. In fact, recent evaluations show that Bush policies never created any real growth -- the ephemeral financial upswings of the past eight years were based on market bubbles and economic Band-Aids.

2. The worst financial crisis since the 1930s. The Bush administration, flacking an "ownership society," helped manufacture the housing bubble. When it burst, Americans lost $6 trillion in housing wealth (so far), fueling a market crash that has cost Americans $8 trillion of stock wealth, according to economist Dean Baker. On a grand scale, we've been mugged.

3. The worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. That's what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., correctly called the Iraq war. This pre-emptive war -- based on phony pretenses -- is now the second longest in our nation's history (after Vietnam). Some 35,000 Americans are dead or wounded, as well as an enormous number of innocent Iraqis. And even today, more than five years later, can anyone explain why Bush marched us into this quagmire?

4. Unprecedented rejection of human rights. Recently, a Bush administration official finally admitted that the U.S. government engaged in torture at Guantanamo Bay detention center. Bush admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding. While these clear violations of the Geneva Conventions would have been unthinkable a few years ago, today we're not surprised. From Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, to years-long detention of innocents and the unrestrained killing of civilians by U.S.-paid mercenaries, this administration has systematically squandered our nation's moral standing in the world, making us less able to protect Americans and American interests worldwide.

5. Watergate-style abuses of power. As the House Judiciary Committee staff has documented, Bush used the politics of fear and division to justify warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans (including U.S. soldiers fighting overseas), spying on peaceful domestic groups and the use of national security letters to pry into the private records of millions of Americans. He also presided over illegal politicization of the Justice Department and retribution against critics. In fact, Bush claimed the authority to disobey hundreds of laws -- as if Richard Nixon were right when he famously said: "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

6. Unprecedented increases in inequality. The Economic Policy Institute reports, "For the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data back in the mid-1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of this business cycle than they were when it started." That's because Bush policy was designed to increase economic inequality. The richest 1 percent of the population received 36 percent of the Bush tax cuts; the least-affluent 40 percent received only 9 percent. While the rich got exponentially richer, the poverty rate and the percentage of uninsured dramatically increased.

7. A culture of sleaze. This was an administration without shame. Kicked off by Vice President Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, the administration fostered a "greed is good" culture. The subsequent conservative money scandals (Jack Abramoff; White House officials J. Steven Griles and David Safavian;  Republicans Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Duke Cunningham of California and Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska) and other lawlessness (Cheney's Chief of Staff O. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana, Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho) have toppled the conservative "moral values" façade into the gutter, where it belongs.

8. Blind rejection of science. The Bush administration thumbed its nose at scientific evidence that contradicted conservative political goals. The resulting lies about global warming, endangered species, toxic chemicals and consumer products threaten the health and safety of every American. And the virtual outlawing of stem cell research has delayed important medical advances by years, causing immeasurable suffering and loss of life.

9. Utter refusal to protect the health, safety and legal rights of Americans. Following the conservative business-is-always-right philosophy, Bush dismantled the agencies and rules designed to protect consumers from unscrupulous businesses, workers from reckless employers and small companies from anti-competitive large companies. If conservatives didn't like a federal law, they blocked, hindered or defunded agency enforcement.

10. Presiding over our nation's worst natural disaster, and not caring. Hurricane Katrina was transformed from a calamity into a national disgrace by the sheer incompetence and indifference of the Bush administration. Before the hurricane struck, Bush had downsized the Federal Emergency Management Agency and placed in charge a political crony with no relevant experience. When Katrina ripped through Mississippi and Louisiana and inflicted nearly $100 billion in damages in New Orleans to become the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, FEMA was unprepared to help, and thousands of Americans suffered the consequences. More than three years later, New Orleans still has not recovered.

So, congratulations for being the worst president in American history. That's not just my personal opinion; that's the opinion of 109 historians polled by the History News Network. Fully 61 percent ranked Bush as the "worst ever;" 98 percent labeled his presidency a "failure." And this poll, taken in early 2008, predated the cataclysmic housing and banking crashes. Bye-bye W -- history will not be kind.

The Day After the Inauguration: Scott Lucas on the BBC World Service and Ireland's Newstalk

This morning I chatted with the BBC World Service's World Update about the Obama Inaugural, ranging across topics from Obama's style to relations with the Muslim world to the economic and foreign policy challenges.

Thanks also to Dublin Newstalk's Right Hook, where I just had an excellent conversation with regular host George Hook, speaking from Washington, and studio host Ivan Yates about the prospects for an Obama Administration.

A Gut Reaction to The Obama Inaugural Speech

Related Post: And on the Eighth Day - Hopes and Fears Over the Obama Foreign Policy

It is a strange feeling watching this day, sitting amidst technology which gives access to numerous television channels, Internet streams, and Twitter.

On the one hand, no amount of detachment --- not even the challenge of writing a live blog and providing a running analysis --- could separate me from the excitement and the enthusiasm of today. I have said this as a pro forma for media interviews but today I believed it, "Growing up in Alabama in the midst of the racial issues of the 1960s and 1970s, I never dreamed that I would see an African-American become President of the United States."



And those hundreds of thousands on the Mall not only were in the midst of a realised dream but in the midst of hope. In the middle of an economic crisis, in the middle of a foreign-policy mess from Iraq to Afghanistan to the Middle East, facing the unknown extent of climate change, they took in and radiated hope. A hope for most that, after the division and destruction and turmoil of the last eight years, light would come out of darkness.

Obama's speech was not a great speech, by his standards; there were too many formulae that had to be laid out: the tributes to America's greatness but also the warnings of recent drift, the possibilities of freedom but the need to achieve it and protect it, the responsibilties of citizenship. These had to be carred across general references to the economy, social issues, America's common defense, foreign policy.

But, working to and laying out those formulae, Obama offered his flourishes: the reference that, 60 years after his father was refused service in a restaurant, he was taking "the sacred oath" of the Presidency, the tribute to both "fallen heroes" and those who served by taking in the dispossessed when the levees broke, the invocation "“This is the price and promise of our citizenship….This is the meaning of our liberty.” And I must add that it was wonderful, both for hope and a bit of retribution, that the cameras cut away to former President Bush as Obama said:

We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine drafted a charter of ideals which inspired the world...[which] assured the rule of law and the rights of man.

On the other hand....

When I go back to the keyboard, rewind the video, glance at the world via Internet feeds, I have a great concern.

US Presidents have to talk tough. American political culture doesn't accept Presidential weaklings (did you notice Jimmy Carter on the platform?) in either rhetoric or action. So Obama had to combine the offers of friendship with the warning that, if you oppose the US, "we will defeat you". He had to speak of common dangers to the planet but also to affirm that, in addressing those challenges, "America must lead". He directly addressed "the Muslim world" for a relationship based "on mutual trust and respect" but also chastised those who are corrupt and deceitful. He offered peace but only "if you will unclench your fist".

This speech --- in the revival of hope, the call for unity, the offer of friendship, and the warning to America's enemies --- is a descendant of John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 Inaugural. And thus it should be noted that, while the Kennedy Administration could be commemorated for its calls for global development and progress, it could also be remembered for the confrontations that included the Bay of Pigs and the escalation of the disastrous involvement in Vietnam.

Is Obama's invocation of "America", one which stemmed from and added to the hope of today, one that is going to be offered to others, both friend and foe? Or will it be delivered in the terms of "you lead, we follow"? Freedom is a wonderful concept, but in the current conflicts that always face the Obama Administration, it is an abstraction beyond political, economic, and military realities.

So part of the concern is that, on the day after the Inauguration, the rhetoric of today has to meet the reality of what has happened in Israel, Palestine, and Gaza in the last month. It is that his reference to the Muslim world with trust and respect but also with a response to the "clenched fist" must define itself with the troubled relationship with Iran. It is that Obama's warning "we will defeat you" has to confront the complexity of the unrest in Pakistan. It is that, with a broken United Nations and damage to the notion of international co-operation, "America must lead" has to address the response of others that "America must listen". It is that his promise that the United States will abide by "a Charter of law" has to negotiate through the legal and political challenges that will threaten his promise to close Guantanamo Bay (not to mention, his silence on other American detention facilities such as Camp Bagram in Afghanistan).

And, at the end of this day, I note --- very narrowly, perhaps, but I believe pertinently --- that Obama only moved beyond generalities to refer specifically to two other countries. He promised that the United States would leave Iraq to its people, an allusion to the timetable for the withdrawal of US combat troops (but not, it should be noted, all troops). And he immediately followed that with an American commitment to the "security of Afghanistan".

I hope I'm wrong. But, for all the hope of a new America, the rhetoric that precedes and underpins this America --- the rhetoric of our vigiliance, our "common defense" against enemies, our extension of freedom --- means that Barack Hussein Obama will double the US troop level in Afghanistan from 30,000 to 60,000. And when he does so, with many crowing that he is simply following Bush's War on Terror rather than rejecting it, with others declaring that our liberalism requires such interventions, he will open Pandora's Box on his own war.

I hope I'm wrong. But if that happens, it will be hard to reach back to the hope of today. Hard to reach back not because we didn't believe in the vision of this historic moment, but because we did.