The Legacy of Bush 43
I’ve been reflecting on how history will judge President George W. Bush. This is a difficult topic. There are those who actually hate him, viscerally and with no sense of fairness or proportion. There are also those who like him and strongly support him, despite everything. I fall somewhere in the middle, and I suspect there are a lot of other people in the same place.
To begin, there was the election of 2000, which Democrats believe was stolen from them in Florida and by the Supreme Court. Anyone who has actually read the Court’s Bush v. Gore decision, along with the history of how it got to the Supreme Court, knows it wasn’t stolen. Those who go further and read the studies of what most likely would have happened if the decision had gone the other way know that Gore probably would have lost anyway. Sadly, facts like this don’t matter, at least not yet.
People who still support Bush unreservedly are equally blind. He did things that turned out badly, and he missed opportunities to do better. In particular, his management of federal taxing and spending was atrocious. You can’t tax like a Republican and spend like a Democrat and get away with it forever. The economic crisis of 2008 will also blemish his legacy for the short term, even though he didn’t do much to cause it and couldn’t have done much to prevent it.
The term “current history” is an oxymoron. The most significant source we now have on the presidency of Bush 43 is the media, which has been consistently biased against him. Their reporting for the past eight years has consisted not so much of outright lies, Dan Rather notwithstanding, but of a constant drumbeat of negative and misleading information. The media bears a heavy responsibility for turning Americans and foreigners alike against the President and the U.S. itself. Slipping along behind them, like street sweepers following the horses in a parade, have been ill-educated but fashionable Hollywood glitterati, liberal bloggers spewing spittle onto their monitors, and all the usual foreign and domestic America-haters.
I think objective historians in a decade or two will present a much more balanced and factual picture of President Bush and his administration. The reality of 2000 will be better understood; Katrina will be seen as a situation in which local and state governments failed badly, with the federal government doing better but not well; foreign assistance programs will be seen as strengthened and improved, with significantly greater support for the fight against AIDS; scandals such as those involving “torture,” electronic surveillance, WMDs, firing U.S. Attorneys, and so on will seem much less significant when put in perspective; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be acknowledged as qualified successes; and most important, President Bush will get credit for preventing a major attack on U.S. soil after 9/11.
To some extent, this is a natural process. History doesn’t work well with passions of the present swirling around it. Truman is seen in a much more better light than he was a half-century ago, and Eisenhower’s presidency is being re-evaluated as time goes on. Even Nixon is now being given more credit for his accomplishments. So it will be with George W. Bush.
I’m not trying to paint President Bush in glowing colors. I don’t think he was a particularly good president. But I think he was better than Gore would have been and significantly better than Kerry would have been. Time will tell–but I’m betting that the real history of this time, when finally written, will portray President Bush as a president who did a creditable job in a very difficult time.
(This article was also posted at Opinion Forum.)
Comments? Leave your intelligent feedback down below or consider following CollegeTimes on Facebook or Twitter to stay updated or to get in touch!
There are so many places to attack 43 that one has a difficult time just on getting to the first one. I don’t have time, nor do i wish to become embattled with the neocons from either side of the issue on just what he did or didn’t do. I wish to only state that like all Rebublicans if you are making alot of money and can weather the storm then maybe you like what he has done. When all of europe and asia laugh at one of our elected presidents and the joke writers all over the globe wish he could stay a few more years as the material was just so easy to write. Well, I think that says all that needs to be said. In the end it is the common persons fault that we allow our country to be run by crooks and thieves. When we the people, rediscover our backbone and start throwing ropes over tree limbs; then we will have a new country. Bush wanted to be president and that is a good thing for every American to aspire to, but that is not enouh and now we see the fruit of our hasty choice. I just hope all those southerners with there bibles are happy with what they traded there votes for.
Bush 43 was a pretty horrible president in his own right, there’s no denying that (and I’m not saying that Gore would have been any better, except that we might be further along the road of more efficient energy sources, like solar), because he was a warmongerer and a homophobe; we went into Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden for 9/11, but here it is 8 years later and we’re still no closer to getting him. As for Iraq, why did we go in in the first place? We had no business there. But! I will concede that the mass media did everything in its power to demonize the man, which would only be right if he was a war criminal and just genuinely criminal against humanity, such as Hitler and Hussein (though it wasn’t our place to take him down). Was he a good president? No. Was he as completely horrible as the media paints him and the world believes him? Not entirely.
Tom Carter says: By the way, I hope you cleaned the spittle off your monitor before it dried.
LOL! =)
tominbangkok: I always enjoy a thoughtful, intelligent, adult discussion of political ideas. Too bad you’re not up to that.
By the way, I hope you cleaned the spittle off your monitor before it dried.
Are you a moron? What other explanation can there be? Bush was the worst thing that ever happened to the U.S. and anyone that can’t see that doesn’t have an ounce of common sense or intelligence. Bush did a creditable job in a difficult time? He created the difficult time, you idiot. It’s people like you who contributed to the downfall of the U.S. Who are you voting for in 2012? Sarah Palin?
Well said.