Bush a Strong Contender For Worst U.S. President Ever

If only U.S. President George W. Bush could point to some meaningful successes, he and his administration might more readily be excused for having been otherwise occupied while the captains of American high finance were busy cooking up the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unfortunately, he cannot. The best he can claim in Iraq is that the situation is not as bad as he originally made it by launching an illegal invasion justified by a campaign of shameless lies and obfuscations. And now his own intelligence community is warning that Afghanistan – greater focus on which might have made Bush’s so-called “war on terror” more of a mission and less of a macabre joke – is in the midst of a “downward spiral” that threatens the collapse of central authority.

In fact, so comprehensive is the Bush record of failure that he and his crew risk going down in history as the worst collection of arrogant incompetents ever to run the executive branch of the world’s most powerful country. Herbert Hoover was the president who “led” America into the Depression, but at least he managed to avoid disastrous foreign military adventures. Lyndon Johnson frittered away 58,000 American lives in Vietnam, but at least he managed to keep the US economy on a relatively even keel. Bush, on the other hand, has accomplished both martial malfeasance and economic calamity during a single presidency – all while taking the US government’s budget from record surpluses to record deficits and its international stature from imposing to impotent.

Bush’s legacy figures to be especially damaging for the Arab and Islamic worlds, where his unabashed hypocrisy has helped to undermine the credibility of those he professed to support: democratic reformers. Once it became clear that his rhetoric about bringing better and more accountable governance to the region was little more than cover for an even more virulent form of the counter-productive pro-Zionist aggression that has typified US policy for decades, Middle Eastern democrats of every possible orientation were either tarred by his embrace or crippled by his active punishment of those who cast ballots in free and fair elections.

The (potential) saving grace is that unless the Bushies find a loophole in the laughably named USA PATRIOT ACT that allows him to extend his term in office, he will ride back to Texas in January 2009. All that the rest of us can do until then is keep our fingers crossed and hope that he has no more catastrophes planned for the twilight of his failed presidency.