The real Bush legacy: Failure under fire.

[nickgutierrez]

First, a disclaimer. I write this not as a partisan Democrat with a lefty agenda, though I certainly can be accused of that at other times. I write this as an American, a citizen of the United States, as an observation of the first presidency of my adult life.

There are three days that define the Bush presidency. The first one is the one that the administration itself has provided as its defining moment: September 11, 2001. Let's put aside the obvious: the August 6th PDB that declared that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the US, the subsequent and inexcusable failure to defend this country, or to capture or kill bin Laden in the aftermath, the fact that these attacks were used to justify two wars, the erosion of civil liberties, the Patriot Act, torture which has been confirmed as torture by figures within this very administration in the past week, and a constant culture of fear and paranoia and faux patriotism stoked by the periodical hair-on-fire terror alert. Take all that and put it aside for the moment. The thing that actually defines the Bush presidency is the fact that he sat on his rear end and read "My Pet Goat" as the World Trade Center burned, as the nation's chief military facility was struck, as a plane went down in a Pennsylvania field. But surely, after he actually bothered to leave the classroom, he got around to dealing with the nation's problems, right? Well, no. He apparently thought it was more important to play Air Force One hopscotch, to jump from state to state in a plan to I'll let you know when I've figured it out. It took him nine days to develop a coherent response plan, and a severely flawed one at that.

The next day is August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts. http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline/">Think Progress summarizes the timeline better than I ever could, but let's run through the details. The administration was notified of the breached levees early that morning. That very same morning, the President - the leader, the commander-guy - visited Senator John McCain on the far more important occasion of his birthday, including a photo-op in which a seemingly carefree President Bush held a cake as water flowed through New Orleans's ninth ward. Later that day, Bush took to the campaign trail to discuss another thing apparently more important than drowning people: his disastrous prescription drug plan. You know, the one that obliterated the government's ability to negotiate the prices of prescription drugs, allowing pharmaceutical companies to quite literally name their own price when it deals with Medicare. The next day, he talked about Iraq at a naval base, and plays guitar with a country music star, and news emerges of the U.S.S. Bataan, capable of making up to 100,000 gallons of fresh drinkable water, sits virtually unused in the Gulf of Mexico. It took another day, August 31, 2005 - two days after the storm hits, five days after an official state of emergency was declared by then-Governor of Louisiana Kathleen Blanco - before the President does the ultimate in delaying, buck-passing tactics that still look like action: organize a task force to coordinate a federal response. Again, delayed, severely flawed, and unacceptable.

As a sidenote, here's what the HHS website has to say about the tragedy:

On August 28th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the southern coast of the United States with devastating effect.  It was reported that more then 1,800 people lost there lives, and more then $81 billion dollars in damages occurred.

Nice symbolism, idiots. Why should we expect a competent federal response, when the official government website doesn't care enough to properly proofread the page dedicated to the disaster?

The third was Sepember 15, 2008, when Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America and Lehman Brothers collapsed, a victim of its own greed, and actively enabled by this administration's policy of corporate deregulation. This, along with already-spreading epidemic of collapsing subprime mortgages, triggered a financial collapse, which froze the credit markets and aggravated the already-existing recession. Consider that the Federal Reserve first started cutting interest rates as a result of the credit crisis in September of 2007, and that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over nine days previous. Any competent leader would have realized that a financial emergency was in the offing, and would have taken more significant steps to help solve the crisis. Unfortunately, George W. Bush is not a competent leader. Four days after the collapse, as the stock markets hemorrhaged, as the economy burned, the best they could come up with was a half-brained plot to give money to the banks, with Herr Paulson as Handout-Guy-In-Chief, with the vague hope that maybe the money might somehow find their way into the credit markets. Instead, the banks used that money to buy other banks, furthering the consolidation and anticompetitive behavior that triggered the crisis in the first place. In case you haven't noticed the trend: Delayed, flawed, and unacceptable.

The thread that combines the three is a systematic culture of failure under fire. For all his bluster as the Commander Guy, and the Commander-in-Chief, and The Decider, when crisis struck and required an answer, it was left to the people that fundamentally believe that government doesn't work to make government work. The response, time and time again, was delayed, flawed, and unacceptable, and no amount of legacy polishing is going to change what really happened.