 Baby Bush: The Worst President in
History?
"The
latest from The Big Guy"...
Doug Casey
The
Casey Report
Aug 18, 2009
I recognize that I've antagonized
many subscribers over the years with "Bush Bashing."
In January, just after OBAMA!'s election, I said I wouldn't mention
Bush again, his departure having made him irrelevant. I only
feel bad that he and his minions will apparently get away scot-free
with their crimes; better they had all been brought up before
a tribunal and tried for crimes against humanity in general and
the U.S. Constitution in particular. But that is objectively
true of almost all presidents since at least Lincoln.
Most of our subscribers to
The
Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals
- i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic
freedom for the individual. The next largest group are "conservatives."
It's a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who
atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things
(either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or
200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone
who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means
suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and
customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support
economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)?
It's unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism,
by whatever definition, rests on.
Which leads me to the question:
Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling
for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it's because Bush liked
to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values,
and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem
sincere. Bush's tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted
to Clinton's eloquence, which made him look "slick."
I'm forced to the conclusion
that what "conservatives" like about Bush is his style,
such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that
Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even
these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests,
rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale
cut in rates.
Is it possible that Bush was
actually the worst president ever? I'd say he's a strong contender.
He started out with a gigantic lie -- that he would cut the size
of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars --
and things got much worse from there. Let's look at just some
of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime
created.
- No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department
of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive
and costly part of local schools.
- Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts
the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws
before it.
- Medicare Prescription Drug
Benefit. This the largest
expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already
bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive
change to the securities laws since the '30s. A major reason
why companies will either stay private or go public outside the
U.S.
- Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement,
featuring martial law.
- Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current
financial crisis lies in Bush's encouragement of easy credit
to everybody and inflating the housing market.
- Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created,
he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far
the largest bailouts in U.S. history (until OBAMA!).
- Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war
protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they're now used
to herd.
- The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for
passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write
something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically
allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects.
Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring.
Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.
- The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which
Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in
particular but on a tactic. It's become a cause of mass hysteria
and an excuse for the government doing anything.
- Invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. Bush started
two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive
wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.
- Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous
of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington,
DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a
police state.
- Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them
(like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being
in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years.
A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an "enemy
combatant" to be completely deprived of any rights at all.
- Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands
of foreign nationals, Bush made it a U.S. policy to use torture
to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a
guard's whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things
to the reputation of the U.S. ever. It says to the world, "We
stand for nothing."
- The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the
names of over a million people on this list, and it's still growing
at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other
purposes in the future.
- The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000
middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow
citizens' dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously.
God forbid you're not polite to them.
- Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis
of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them
back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.
- Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress
did than any other president in history.
The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not "evil"
(to use a word he favored), completely uninformed, or thoughtless
would favor Bush is because he wasn't a Democrat. Not that there's
any real difference between the two parties anymore
As disastrous as he was, I
rather hate to put him in competition for "worst president"
in the company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts,
Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is simply too small a character
- psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow,
duplicitous, small-minded - to merit inclusion in any list. On
second thought, looking over that list of his personal characteristics,
he's probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR's polish and
rhetorical skills. I suspect he'll just fade away as a non-entity,
recognized as an embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of
hanging by his heels from a lamp post, although Americans aren't
(yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once
supported him will, at least if they have any circumspection
and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim they were to
have been duped by a nobody.
The worst shame of Bush - worse
than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars
- is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric
in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes
his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done
the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters
Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly
said he believed in it.
And he's left OBAMA! with a
fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater
intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush
era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that
the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius
after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of
many imperial coups and civil wars.
-Doug Casey
Only by looking
at the past can we make sure that history won't repeat itself.
But most of the time, Doug and his co-editors of The Casey
Report look at the future. They analyze budding trends for
potential money-making opportunities and share that research
with their subscribers usually for two- or three-digit gains.
One of their favorite investments of 2009 is a play on an economic
inevitability that is almost guaranteed to bring
early birds big returns. Read
more here.
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1998-2009 by Casey Research, LLC.
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