Bush's Accomplishments - Smaller Than Life

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered. Desperate for padding, they devote four risible pages to portraying our dear leader as a zealous environmentalist.

But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage.

... the rest from Frank Rich after the click.

My comment: He was a stellar president ... if you ignore just about everything he did.

I remember some spirited debates with a good friend in the run up to the 2000 election. In actuality, neither of us could muster much enthusiasm for either candidate. We voted our separate ways ... both holding the opinion that it really didn't matter all that much. It seemed that Democrats and Republicans looked a lot alike at that point. The press threw its glowing support behind the smug little draft dodging frat boy and mocked the socially uptight intellectual to the extent that it was hard to distinguish fact from fiction. In the meantime, how much difference could one man make ... particularly in a democracy with checks and balances? Then I watched in "shock and awe" as the next eight years worth of news reels unfolded.

How wrong we were. One man can make a heck of a lot of difference ... particularly when the spin machine has half the population hood-winked ... twice over.

They say that history is written by the victor. Maybe that's not always the case. We are witnessing an attempt to write history ... by a consummate looser.