Today’s NY Times headline: In Bush’s Last Year, Modest Domestic Aims.
Modest aims for a VERY modest presidency. And all I can say is bless us all that the George Bush of capacious and ruinous political ambition has been replaced by the chastened George Bush of his final year. Hopefully, his ability to do evil at home and abroad has been considerably diminished.
What an embarrassment that article 1s. Shouldn’t the NY Times paste “Steno Journalism” warnings on puff pieces like that?
Mr. Bush’s heritage on the domestic front includes fewer health-insured children (from his SCHIP veto), less food for lower income people as rising food prices erode the value of food stamps and empty food pantry shelves (from his opposition to the nutrition provisions of the Farm Bill) and colder homes as heating assistance is cut (at his direction) while oil prices soar and shifting the burden of paying for his multi-trillion-dollar war in Iraq from wealthier to lower income people. What a compassionate conservative!
Yet the reporter, caught in Bush-spun psycho-fantasies, mentions these harms not at all.
A year or two ago, the members of the American Historical Association voted that GWB was the worst president ever — that’s not a modest achievement! Note, too, that historians tend to be conservative by temperament, however they may vote.
My real concern is, what will future presidents do with the autocratic powers he has amassed, the autocratic example he has set? We’ve gone from “Imperial Presidency” to “Autocratic Presidency,” and I doubt we will go back.
Zhu Bajie