The Blog

Jan 19, 2009

Eight Years of Epic Fail 

by Maxim Porges @ 11:44 PM | Link | Feedback (2)





"Mission Accomplished"? Perhaps - if the mission was to enact an incompetent administration, take us to war on false pretenses, fail to pay any attention to a national disaster, allow an economic meltdown, and successfully dodge accountability for any of it.

Was George W. Bush the worst president in history? I don't know enough history to answer that fairly, but in my opinion he was the worst in recent memory. Any one of the crowning achievements listed in my last paragraph would be sufficient to put a scarlet letter on a president's legacy, but to rack up five of them in eight years is astounding.

But at the end of the day, it's not Bush's fault - it's ours. If a company hires somebody who is ill-equipped to do the job and doesn't fire them, it's not the employee's fault. Bush was voted in under suspicious circumstances; we failed to dig deeper. He was voted in a second time; we failed to produce a worthy alternative. And in the last two years when Bush really began to reveal how out of touch and short of solutions he was, we failed to throw him out.

If anything, the last eight years has proven less to me about Bush's inadequacies as a leader, and more about how fragile our political system is and how powerless we are to impeach our leadership when the time comes. I shudder to think about how much worse could things have gotten while we sat around and grumbled rather than doing anything serious about it. Bush is not a deliberately evil person, but imagine the damage that could have been done if he was.

Let's hope the new guy does better.