So President Bush is making the rounds, defending his legacy such as it is, and reminding people of his successes and trying to downplay the failures. 

Fair enough.

These are the things we will remember the Bush Administration for:

• 9/11/01.  Overall, an appropriate response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.  We will remember well the stirring moment when President Bush stood shoulder to shoulder with a weary looking firefighter at 'ground zero' and reassured a staggered nation that an aroused America would be heard 'round the world.  He made good on his promise, and then some.  Regardless of what other criticisms can be leveled at Bush, it is an incontrovertible fact that because of the Bush Administrations' actions, no terrorist succeeded in a follow up attack on American soil for the remainder of his Presidency. 
  
• The Taliban. One of the most underrated, under celebrated spectacular covert/military campaigns to shatter the Taliban's grip on Afghanistan.  The strategy, speed, and scope of the crushing defeat will be studied in military academies around the world for generations to come, as will what went wrong after the Taliban were brought down.
  
• The Disastrous War.  The rationale for the Iraqi War to unseat Saddam Hussein will go down in history as one of the most spectacular and costly military blunders by any American President.  We believe in the fullness of time, scholarly posterity may look favorably upon the strategic implications ousting Hussein and planting the seeds of democracy.  We reject the notion that democracy can't succeed in the middle east - not after we witnessed ordinary Iraqi's literally risk their lives just to cast a free vote in a free and fair election.  However, the over-emphasis on nuclear weapons programs, long since dismantled and dormant, will never be forgotten.  We feel the war with Iraq was the right thing to do strategically, for all the wrong reasons.  However, what we cannot countenance, and what we cannot forgive, is the jaw-dropping, mind-boggling incompetence displayed by Bush and his administration in post combat Iraq.  President Bush can rationalize that fiasco as much as he wants, but the one thing we don't envy him is the knowledge that his failures at leadership, and managing his cabinet subordinates, led directly to the loss of several thousand magnificent citizen solders, let alone tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi's slaughtered in the cross-fire.  We shudder to think how we would cope with such a burden.
• Senior Citizen prescription drug plan.  One day in the not too distant future we will be in this class of US citizenry.  However, this program was so hopelessly flawed, over-complicated, and under-funded that we are still agog at it's sponsorship by a "conservative" President.  The only good to come out of this program is that it is a text-book style case study on why the Government should henceforth NEVER be allowed to create a new bureaucracy.  The Government's administration of this plan was/is so bad that it belongs in a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch - preferably viewed while drunk.   And people want the US Government to take over all heath care - swallowing about 1/6th of our economy in one gulp?  We don't think so.  We don't think so.
• Hurricane Katrina.  Actually we will not remember President Bush for this.  The abysmal response to the largest natural disaster to befall the United States in modern times was not his fault.  It wasn't even FEMA's fault, though in the aftermath they blundered.  The responsibility for the Katrina fiasco lies chiefly with the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana.  The Federal Government has never been a first responder to disaster.  That is always the responsibility of local and State Government.  However, because of the war, and Bush's unpopularity, it was very easy to blame him first.  Like it or not, Katrina is not something you can hang on his neck, even though he foolishly accepted blame when he should have been kicking State and Local ass.  Here is a another text-book case study in perception replacing reality - and this is a very dangerous growing trend.
  
• Deficit Spending.  While we supported the President in the war with Iraq, we vehemently opposed borrowing money to pay for it.  Deficit spending is a cancer which is steadily consuming the entire Nation.  The President refused to pay for the war, congress went along with it, and the hundreds of billions in deficits year after year materially weakened the United States for what was to come out of left field next.....
• Easy Credit meltdown.   As we have documented in previous posts, the financial meltdown that occurred by the bursting of the housing bubble was largely manufactured by the Democratic Party.  However, the Republican Party largely ignored the warnings coming from within, and without, to the dangerous excesses, and largely acquiesced to Democratic meddling in the mortgage/finance space.  Government was THE essential enabler which allowed Wall Street, and off Wall Street to run amok.  President Bush was in charge at the time.  He did almost nothing to thwart the Democrats and their nearly fatal gambit, so the buck stops with the President.  We are also blisteringly critical of the Presidents' lack of leadership throughout much of this crisis.  Like most everybody else, President Bush had a deer-in-the-headlights look about him.  The vacuum of leadership in Washington in the waning days of the Bush Presidency was nothing short of astonishing.

Farewell President Bush - you did very good, and you did very bad.  Sadly, we have no hope that Barack Obama will do better.  A weary, shocked, depressed nation craves for leadership, confidence, strength......and there is none. 

Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio......