Evaluating the Bush Presidency

I received an interesting email this morning from a concerned reader:
"Midget:
The Bush Administration is likely at its darkest hour. You've spent countless hours making a case against them. And you spent all week writing about sports? WHAT THE FUCK??????"

I appreciate your concern. However, there have been times here when I felt like I've been beating a very dead and very partisan horse. It's encouraging that the general public is finally getting a clue about the job he's doing as President. If you click on that link, you can see the trends in the data are not favorable. But that hasn't kept some Republican loyalists from sending me email:

"Ryan, your website is boring because it's so one sided that there's never any real discussion going on here. Can't you admit all the good things that President Bush has done for democracy in the middle east? You're going to delete this message, but I wanted to let you know that I think your site is crap and that you're clueless."

Ouch! I won't even address the fact that this guy capitalized President Bush, but failed to capitalize a region of the world in the same sentence, but I will address the comments about what the President has done in Iraq.

One thing that I will absolutely give President Bush credit for is deposing Saddam Hussein. It should have been done by his father or Clinton, but there is no doubt that it absolutely needed to be done. People who argue this point are no better than our friend with the capitalization problems above.

The problem is that deposing Saddam Hussein wasn't the reason that we invaded Iraq when we did. Remember? We invaded Iraq because Saddam was going to use nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against us and because he was connected with Al Qaeda. Subsequent investigations have revealed that he didn't have those weapons to use and that we jumped the gun. We just hit 2,000 US Soldiers killed yesterday. Not to mention the thousands of innocent Iraqis that have died since our invasion.

The looming investigation of perjury among top Bush Administration officials, including Bush right-hand-man Karl Rove, is related to the Administration's mission to destroy or discredit those who would have evidence indicating that Iraq didn't have intent to develop a weapons program, as the Bush Administration stated thousands of times. Rove revealed to a news reporter that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, after her husband came out publicly against Bush's statement that Saddam had attempted to purchase weapon's grade uranium. Why is revealing the identity of a CIA agent a crime: click here to find out.

Not to mention, we didn't elect him to be our democracy builder, we elected him to be our President of our country. He's been meeting with Bono and world leaders about world poverty, which is undoubtedly a huge problem, but also a growing one here in America. Bush appropriated billions of dollars for homeland security, but we're still not paying our police and firefighters adequately. 10 million AMERICAN children do not have access to health care.

And then there's nepotism. If you want evidence of what a bad thing nepotism can be, look no further than former FEMA Director Michael Brown and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not one of those idiots who blames FEMA for EVERYTHING bad that happened after Hurricane Katrina, but reasonable people can agree that FEMA was highly ineffective, and having the Director of FEMA on CNN after a hurricane blaming the poor because they stuck around for a hurricane sums up Brown's effectiveness in that post. Bush has a long history of such nominations. He didn't help his cause when he nominated his personal lawyer and friend to the Supreme Court, despite the fact that she failed a part of a questionaire on constitutional law.

I am sorry if I disagree that Bush has done a good job as President. If you make a list of good things he has done (deposing Saddam), you can list 30 other instances of complete incompetance. If Bush's only charge as President was to dipose Saddam, you could still make the argument that it was handled poorly and that we invaded under a complete lie. The intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was not misconstrued, it was absent so that it could have never been construed, correctly or not, in the first place. Stand by your man, Republicans. I need a beer.