On Monday night George Bush once again publicly displayed his inability to connect with reality. As was expected, in his final State of the Union address he tried to show that he is still an effective president of the United States and in charge!!
Given the fact that the diminished presidency of a state in decline will come to an end in less than a year, emperor George used his boring speech to spin the disasters of his seven years of lies, ignorance and arrogance.
With the US economy almost bankrupt and--as some respectable western experts recently noted--surviving on borrowed time and other peoples’ money, we must admit that Bush spoke clearly on one point. He said the biggest economy of the world (saddled with a $9 trillion national debt) has entered “uncertain“ territory and that the good old days are over, probably forever.
It must be noted, albeit unsurprisingly, that of all the bad things visiting Americans for the better part of the Bush II era, he could not gather the courage and honesty to take responsibility for his actions or the lack of it.
When Bush Inc. took over from Bill Clinton in 2001, the US economy was in relatively good health and put together an impressive $130 billion in surplus. Key economic indices including the employment rate, investments, the bourse, foreign trade balanceÉwere satisfactory and improving.
Bush and the neocons intoxicated with power took the country to war and worked terribly well to ensure that times had changed for the millions of working Americans. Gross mismanagement of two illegal foreign invasions (Iraq and Afghanistan) and non-stop borrowing pushed the economy into the red where it is supposed to stay for the next several decades.
Over the years it became abundantly clear that there were fundamental flaws in Bush’s macroeconomic management. His first year in the White House coincided with the huge Enron financial scandal. Then the federal budget got entangled with unprecedented deficits and America’s foreign trade balance declined resulting in the current economic mess highlighted with the ongoing subprime crisis now threatening the economy of many countries.
The political-security performance of the Bush team has been another miserable failure. The 9/11 terror attacks took place in the early days of Bush’s arrival in Washington, and was preceded by the war in Afghanistan and later the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
Although street violence has significantly declined in Iraq over the past six months, US casualties in the Arab country are rising. More than one million Iraqis and 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq so far, and thousands of American troops have developed life-threatening psychological/traumatic conditions.
This is while all of Bush’s much publicized promises of peace, security, and freedom in Iraq have turned out to be fakes.
Bush vowed to “stay the course“ in his war on terror, capture Osama bin Laden, destroy the Al-Qaeda network and make America and its friendly countries a safer place.
Alas! That was not to be despite Bush and his war planners having wasted close to a trillion dollars of US taxpayers money on the unwinnable conflict.
In political terms, Bush and his neocon enablers saw their fortunes diminish more rapidly in the past two years. For the first time in a decade the opposition Democrats took control of the Senate.
He lost many of his close confidantes and cadres in the embattled administration as political and security divisions emerged one after the other. Political mistakes compounded with a pattern of corruption scandals in high places pushed Bush and his ilk toward isolation both at home and abroad.
Seen from our perspective, one of the most outrageous parts of the Bush demagoguery last night was his two paragraphs on Iran and what the Islamic state should and should not do. One could only wonder what really makes the man, so visibly reviled and detested for his crimes against humanity and fast fading into insignificance, tell others how to manage their affairs.