Evaluation of George Bush's First 1000 Days
by Becky Burgwin
It has been a little over 1000 days since George W. Bush was appointed to lead the most powerful nation on the planet. We'd like to take this time to evaluate his performance.
Economics:
Before Mr. Bush was appointed to the presidency, he talked a lot about the impending stock market crash. As soon as he began his term, the stock market crashed. For some reason, consumer confidence was extremely low. We think his dire prediction had something to do with that. The S & P lost 36.9 points. Almost twice as many points as it did on Herbert Hoover's watch in 1929. His tax cuts for the rich have taken almost a trillion dollar surplus and turned it into a record-breaking deficit. His closest advisor, Dick Cheney, has been heard to say that deficits don't matter. Many of America's richest corporations pay no taxes. The tax cut that Mr. Bush says he gave middle-income earners is a misnomer. Mr. Bush wants to tax salary income only. He proposes to abolish the estate (death) tax, (which, as it is now, only taxes estates worth over 1 million dollars,) and taxes on capital gains and dividends"all investment income. If this happens, our country's entire tax burden will be on the wage earners, not the wealthy. Mr. Bush has failed miserably in this area.
The Military:
Mr. Bush deserves to fail in this area for his handling of our troops after putting them in harm's way in Iraq. The entire operation is extremely disorganized. The troops do not have the right equipment for the kind of war they are fighting. They are living in squalid conditions with parents having to send such items as toilet paper, nails and hammers and flak jackets. Most of them have not been properly trained. Kids just out of high school who have had, at best, a month of cursory training in the US are now involved in guerilla combat in Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of people's lives have been ruined in the US and Iraq. Morale is rock bottom and the suicide rate is already 20% higher than the Army's previous record. Troops who have been home only a short time are being redeployed in spite of severe psychological and medical problems or pressing family issues. In spite of this, he seems to believe that the lack of WMD's, the reason these kids are over there in the first place, is good fodder for his stand up comedy act. He gets points off for insensitivity, also, for using this routine right after a tearful speech by deceased journalist David Bloom's wife. We are well aware that Mr. Bush was raised by a woman who, when asked why she does not support media coverage of the bodies of our troops arriving at Dover Air Force Base said, "Why should I have to subject my beautiful mind to that?" However, lack of decent parental guidance is no excuse here and he fails again.
Terrorism (pre-9/11):
Once again Mr. Bush gets a failing grade. According to many of his former advisors, his understanding of and dealings with terrorism in the nine-month period after he formally took office proves that, in spite of repeated warnings, the threat of a terror attack was not on his radar. Not a single member of his team thought that the warnings of impending terrorist attacks were worth looking into on any level, with the possible exception of John Ashcroft, who stopped flying on commercial airlines right before the attack on 9/11. If Mr. Bush and his advisors had informed the American people that a terror attack using hijacked airliners was possible, perhaps the woman at the Florida travel agency, who had two extremely nervous Middle Eastern men buy 2 one way tickets from Boston to San Francisco with cash and then leave without their change, would have alerted authorities. The owners of a flight school might have made more noise about the fact that immigrants of Middle Eastern descent were training to fly jumbo jets but only wanting to learn how to turn them around, not land or take off. This is a particularly glaring failure in that, due to his administration's stunning mishandling of this situation, over 3000 people were killed on 9/11 and countless more in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world.
Terrorism (on 9/11):
The fact that Mr. Bush lied about what he knew and when he knew it earns him another failing grade. He states that while waiting to go into Booker Elementary School that morning, he saw the plane fly into the WTC and thought to himself, "I used to fly planes myself and I thought"Now there's one really bad pilot." Again he earns an "F" for his mind-boggling insensitivity. Not only that, there was no footage of the first plane hitting the building until 9/12. And, if it was the 2nd plane he saw, it's a bit of a stretch to believe that he didn't he notice that the other tower was on fire! If he indeed was told about the 2nd plane while he was in the classroom, why did he sit there laughing with the children for twenty more minutes? Also, according to NORAD, 38 minutes passed between the time that NORAD was told about the hijacking and the moment that two F-15's were scrambled from Otis Air Force Base. Just as they lifted off, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. From there they didn't manage to get a shot off at a single one of the 4 aircraft that had been hijacked and were in the air for almost 2 hours. If there was a plan in place that would protect our country in the event of attack, it failed miserably. Whether this was due to lack of skill or planning on the part of Bush and his team or something more sinister will never be known. This was one of the most abominable security failures in the history of the United States and earns Mr. Bush another failing grade.
Terrorism (post-9/11):
Mr. Bush exhibited a complete lack of understanding of this subject when he allowed a private jet to fly around the country and pick up a group of Saudis, some of whom included members of the Bin Laden family. This alone made fighting terrorism after 9/11 much more difficult in that these Saudis were never questioned regarding what they knew about the events of that day. Also, the lack of preventative measures here at home to keep our borders safe from terrorists and harmful cargo has contributed to this failing grade.
Afghanistan:
After being handed Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance, Bush managed to fail at this too. The Afghans, having lived through over 25 years of war, chaos and a brutal fundamentalist regime, met our troops with flowers, music and dancing in the streets. Bush promised that the US was there to capture Osama bin Laden, oust the Taliban and help the Afghans rebuild. However, that does not appear to be what Mr. Bush had ever planned to do. Instead, he pulled almost all of our available troops from Afghanistan and sent them to Iraq. These troops were specially trained in Middle Eastern languages and culture and were replaced by troops who were trained in Spanish and the ways of Spanish speaking countries. The Afghans have once again been left to fend for themselves against warlords, religious extremists and drug dealers. Because of President Bush and his misguided policies, America has failed the Afghans again and Mr. Bush receives another failing grade.
Iraq:
The war in Iraq is the most incompetent, ill-advised, dishonest war that the US ever been involved in. It is the only pre-emptive war that the US has started and it goes against all of the principles that this country stands for as we try to use our awesome power for good around the world. The effect that this war has had on our fight against terrorism around the globe has been devastating. The number of terrorist attacks has greatly increased and the fighting in Iraq gets worse and worse. The deaths of over ten thousand Iraqi citizens, over 600 soldiers, the UN's Emissary to Iraq, private contractors and at least one of our most beloved journalists makes this the area where Mr. Bush is has failed the most. At the time of this report, Mr. Bush has been responsible for over 20,000 deaths in Iraq and around the world and because we expect that it will only get worse, we give him an incomplete in this area.
Attendance:
Mr. Bush likes to refer to himself as "The War President" but he really should be calling himself "The Vacation President." Mr. Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in our country's history. In spite of the fact that nine months after he took office our country became a victim of the worst attack ever on American civilians, he is still the most vacationing president ever. Today, in fact, as the Iraq war turns into heavy combat and the US Military has blown up an Iraqi mosque with at least 40 civilians inside, Mr. Bush is on vacation. He is still playing chicken and refusing to blink first as our youngest and best children are getting slaughtered in a war for which they weren't properly trained. This is yet another blatant failure on this man's resume.
Honesty and Trustworthiness:
This is the area in which we see the most amount of effort from Mr. Bush. This effort, however, comes in the form of lying. From his first day in office he has been very busy deceiving the American people. The incidences of outright lying by him and his advisors are too many to go into great detail about so we will just list some of them here:
I saw the first plane fly into the WTC on TV.
Saddam Hussein is an imminent threat.
Saddam Hussein has ties to Al Qaeda.
Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11.
Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction
Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium in Niger.
We accidentally left the part about Niger in the State of the Union address.
The reason we're going into Iraq has nothing to do with oil.
A million jobs were lost due to 9/11.
The air around ground zero is safe to breathe.
We did not out Valerie Plame.
We did not ignore Al Qaeda and steer the US towards war with Iraq.
Dick Cheney is not profiting from Halliburton's misadventures in Iraq.
We were not aware that Halliburton was overcharging the American taxpayer.
Jobs in the fast-food industry should be counted as manufacturing jobs.
We created 300,00 jobs.
The Healthy Forest Initiative will be good for our forests.
The Clean Air Act will ensure clean air for generations to come.
Global warming is a myth.
The No-Child Left Behind bill will help children.
I will allocate 15 billion dollars to the global fight against AIDS.
The tax cuts will benefit the middle class.
The Medicare bill will cost 400 billion dollars.
The Medicare bill will be good for our seniors.
Summary:
To call Mr. Bush's performance in his appointed role as leader of the free world lackluster would be an understatement of gigantic proportions. He has been the most dangerous, deceitful and ignorant president in history. In reality his performance has been abominable. We could say Mr. Bush is not working to his full potential but we doubt that he has any potential at all. However, since he has done poorly in everything he has ever undertaken, we can only assume that this is another example of his best work. If that is the case, the man is not only a danger to our country and a danger to the world but may also be a sociopath. In light of this, we most urgently recommend that Mr. Bush be terminated from his position immediately.
Ms. Burgwin's writings have appeared in Time, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Counterpunch, Alternet and OpEdNews as well as several other online Op Ed sites. She is on the Board of Aid Afghanistan and one of the founders of The Assisi Center for the Practice of Peace.
