Thanks for Nothing

Source: Think Progress

As if any thinking person needed further evidence that President Bush has been a complete failure these past seven years, we now have it in an easy-to-read graph form. These past years have not just been a failure of the President but of the entire neo-con message. They have had an almost unprecedented freedom to carry out most of their major decisions and everything they have touched has been a disaster. If you are still a Republican supporter at this stage in the nightmare, there is no helping you. You are like the band on the Titanic except you don’t give aid and comfort to the victims; you try to blame others for your bad policies.

I’ll be the first to admit that statistics can be made to support or attack anything but I think this chart simply spells out what all of us have been feeling lately. I have had the displeasure of witnessing the dollar’s more than 11% decline against the euro in just the past eight months or so. Any American with an automobile has seen gasoline prices skyrocket since the Iraq invasion. Anyone who can read will tell you that the war in Iraq has been a tragedy seemingly without end. We don’t need graphs or statistics to tell us as much.

During most of the Bush administration there has been little in the way of criticism from other conservatives concerning the Bush policies. I never read a single prediction by a right-wing pundit before the war that bore any resemblance to what actually happened once we invaded a sovereign Middle East nation. Only the most foolhardy conservative zealots actually believe that America is safer now than before the invasion; only an idiot could think that we can actually “win” or "finish what we started" in Iraq.

The entire conservative platform is based on theories and falsehoods. They claim to be for smaller government yet have inherited a budget surplus and turned it into a $731 billion deficit. What they mean by smaller government is fewer public services and more pork for leeches like Halliburton and Blackwater. Conservatives still insist that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. This is after the past few years of seeing the biggest bankruptcies in U.S. history. Dick Cheney made $32 million in 2000 as CEO of Halliburton, a private government defense contractor. It’s hard for me to imagine how a government agency could be considered efficient while paying one of its employees $32 million a year, but I’m no accountant.

Conservatives have convinced many Americans that cutting taxes will answer all of life’s problems. Most of their tax cuts have gone to the wealthiest Americans who care little about mundane things like public transportation or health care, things you’ll never be able to purchase with your measly tax break. Conservatives would have you believe that the social democracies of Western Europe that have national health care and great public transportation are socialist hellholes unfit for humans or that they are all on the brink of collapse (kind of ironic since the dollar has tumbled nearly 50% against the euro under Bush). Imagine living in a city with public transportation so efficient that you wouldn’t need to drive a car every day. Think of the money you would save by not owning a car as a tax break. Think of the billions of dollars that Americans spend every year on health insurance and how much better our health system would be if we spent that money on actually treating patients.

The Rolling Stones, in their partying heyday, never trashed a hotel room as badly as Bush has destroyed the American economy and our national reputation—and he still has a year to go. All of these dire economic indicators and we are plunging into a recession!

Bush has spent the years since 9/11 trying to scare the shit out of us with stories of boogey men Muslim extremists squatting in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan. The trouble is that Bush didn’t think it was necessary to find out the exact location of that cave so those actually responsible for 9/11 got a get-out-of-jail card. Of course, the only threat they pose now is merely theoretical. If we had an intelligence operation in America that was even remotely functioning we could have prevented the attack in the first place but that is beside the point this far into the game.

Bush has completely ignored the threat posed by global warming even though a consensus of the world’s scientists agree that this is a serious issue and one that must be addressed sooner rather than later. This real threat is ignored and anyone who talks about global warming is a Chicken Little, scientific studies be damned.

The theme for the Bush years seems to be "Stay the course." He has delivered on that promise. In matters of foreign policy, economics, environmental issues, and just about every other presidential responsibility Bush has struck icebergs and kept going full steam ahead. He and his cronies all have lifeboats, don't you worry about them. It's the rest of us passengers who should be concerned.