Want to know what kind of President George W. Bush really was? Start with this simple question: could Dubya have gone to North Korea last week and freed the two American journalists held captive there?

OK, so international diplomacy wasn't really his thing.

But here, seven month's after Air Force Two carried he and he and his wife away from the White House for the last time, it's difficult to look back on the last eight Years and see any semblance of a positive legacy. 

The economy is in shambles, and as much as anyone can try to pin it on the guy who just took office, it takes a long time to go from economic boom to slowed growth, to plateau, to contraction, to recession, to near-depression. And as easy as it is to blame the economic drop on heavy market deregulation and corporate greed, the problem is less what Bush did than what he didn't do.

The dot-com-bubble-burst was, in fact, inevitable. The economy simply couldn't expand by leaps and bounds every quarter. But the drop-off was forseeable. Had Bush used the $500 billion surplus created under the Clinton Administration to create a bevy of new jobs aimed at green technology instead of a massively expensive, minimally useful tax cut, it would have drastically eased the transition and spared countless thousands of people from joining the ranks of the unemployed.  Or if he'd put pressure on the Big Four automakers to begin producing cars with higher fuel efficiency, it would have prevented or at least mitigated the precipitous drop in American car sales, just as Japanese automakers were reaping the benefits of producing more reliable cars.

And then there's Afghanistan. If Bush had acted sooner, rather than allowing Donald Rumsfeld to persistently pursue one of the most militarily ridiculous counter-insurgency strategies for upwards of two and a half years, our war to the north might never have spun so far out of control to the point it is now, when Taliban warlords have conquered cities within 25 miles of Kabul and the US is being forced to send thousands of additional soldiers to bring the situation under control.

If Republicans presided over the do-nothing Congress, Bush's was the do-nothing White House, even as the ship was taking on water at an alarming pace.

billions of dollars of taxpayer money he gave, and is still being given, to many large corporations. He established a presidency that can violate the constitution with impunity, which Obama has inherited (in case Obama, or any succeeding president, wants to act like a dictator). He, with the help of congress, deregulated the large corps (which lead us to economic collapse). He help further entrench the military industrial complex, as has Obama with a 4% increase in the Pentagon budget.

Of course he did this with the assistance of the republican and democratic parties, and the supreme court, who all seem to feel that the gross consolidation of wealth in this country can make all of them (the ruling elite) rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Bush was far worse than a "do nothing" president. He was actually fairly effective, at least during his first term, in getting his top priorities through Congress. Unfortunately, his policies were dramatically wrong.

In the first year of his presidency, Bush pushed through his huge tax cuts, primarily benefiting the wealthy Americans. One of his big selling points for the tax cut was that the government was in surplus at the time (this part was true), and then he claimed that even allowing for both an economic downturn AND an as yet unforeseen emergency, the tax cuts would at most reduce future surpluses by half. To say the least, his claim was grossly irresponsible, not because it was impossible, but because there was no way he or anybody else could know such a claim to be accurate.

The rationale behind the tax cut of 2001 was every bit the outrageous lie as his rationale for invading Iraq later on.

The tax cuts and the Iraq War are the two main legacies of the George W. Bush presidency. They have two characteristics in common: they were both based on lies to the American people, and we will all continue to pay for the mistakes for many years to come. I only wish Mr. Bush had been a "do nothing" president.

The Bard of Wilmette Website Link

Privatize Social Security like he wanted to do. The old bastards complaining about socialism and health care reform now would be standing in line at a soup kitchen and living in a homeless shelter, if they were lucky. McCain and Palin would have had Secretary of Treasury Phil "Deregulate the Banks" Gramm finish everyone off.