Bush’s Legacy May End Up Better Than You Think
By Amanda Terkel on Radical RightNot only are Bush administration officials rushing out to rewrite President Bush’s legacy as a strong, capable leader, his conservative allies are beginning to jump to his defense as well. Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — one of Bush’s favorite think tanks — has a column today for Bloomberg News in which he writes that the “argument for his [Bush’s] eventual vindication is stronger than many might expect.” Hassett specifically points to Bush’s record on terrorism:
On the home front, to virtually everyone’s surprise, we’ve avoided a terrorist attack since Sept. 11. […]
So it is hard to argue that Bush’s policies were a failure. The unpopular war may have trashed his party, but it didn’t have the same effect on the country.
I just can’t let these kinds of comments go by. Why would any terrorist bother to attack again. They don’t need to lift a finger to hurt us. Any fool can see that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were driven crazy by the 9/11 attack and were hurting us more than any terrorist could ever do. In interpersonal theory, this game is called, "let’s you and him fight." Stir something up, then watch other people beat up each other. Al Qaeda didn’t like Hussein either. Matt Yglesias points out the other obvious counter to this absurd argument below.
Hassett acknowledges that Bush’s “accomplishments were few” on the economic front, but he says that this fact absolves Bush of any responsibility in the economic crisis:The insignificance of Bush’s economic policy, though, might work to his advantage. We are in the midst of the worst recession of our generation, yet it is hard to attribute this crisis to anything that Bush actively did. If his large deficits produced skyrocketing interest rates that crushed the economy, then the argument that Bush caused the mess we’re in might hold water. If he was the one who deregulated the financial sector, then we could justifiably blame him for our predicament.
Similarly, Bush’s Counselor Ed Gillespie wrote a piece for RealClearPolitics yesterday titled, “Myths & Facts About the Real Bush Record.” Gillespie also tried to absolve Bush of any blame for the economic crisis, saying that “the President and his Administration have responded to aggressively” to “the current economic challenges.” But Bush’s inaction on the economy is precisely what helped throw the country into recession. Bush “ignored remarkably prescient warnings” about the collapse of the financial system and eliminated key financial checks and regulations.
As the New York Times reported recently, as early as 2006, Bush and his top advisers “dismissed warnings from people inside and outside the White House that housing prices were inflated and that a foreclosure crisis was looming. And when the economy deteriorated, Mr. Bush and his team misdiagnosed the reasons and scope of the downturn.”
Not only did they ignore obvious warning signs about the housing bubble in a similar way to ignoring warnings about 9/11, they ignored the economy in general. By the time the Market dipped, we were on the brink of collapse. It seems as if the Fed or the Treasury or the S.E.C. might have noticed something about that. When history looks at Bush, it won’t be Hoover that he’s compared to, it will be Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, particularly the latter, who watched passively during the run up to the Great Depression. As much noise as Cheney and Bush have made during their reign, they have essentially been do-nothing Executives. They spent their time being business-advocates and destroying parts of government they didn’t like. In terms of watching over our domestic interests, like the economy, they’ve done nothing. They’ve only been active in foreign affairs by starting, then losing wars.
In the last line of Gillespie’s piece, he writes, “And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.” Matt Yglesias takes issue with Gillespie’s comment:
This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. … Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.Despite Hassett and Gillespie’s revisionist efforts, Americans may unfortunately find that Bush’s legacy is even worse than they think.
History will not only judge Bush and Cheney harshly, history will pass the same judgment on us for:
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Electing them in the first place
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Letting them take us to war in Iraq
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Re-electing them even in the face of their obvious failings
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Not Impeaching them at any of a number of junctures
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Not prosecuting them for War Crimes ourselves
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