Not Your Sweetie

Posted on DU by justicebuilder 03, 03:24 PM (ET)

Wishing for Failure

A fancy new Republican spin-point was on display this weekend – Democrats are “wishing for failure.” Sometimes we’re “hoping for failure.” Once or twice we were “united by hoping for failure.” Hey, at least we’re united.

But as Mark Crispin Miller wrote of a bit of RNC spin from the failed 1992 campaign of Bush’s father, the charge is “designed only to sound damning, not to make a whole lot of sense.” Indeed, if the Democrats were truly hoping for failure, we would be supporting George W. Bush.

Bush’s legacy, such as it is, is a litany of abject failures. He was a poor student in high school, but his family name allowed him to go on and become a poor student at Yale, and then permitted him the opportunity, denied to many excellent students, to become a poor student at Harvard business school. He was a failure in the oil business, running a company into the ground and even failing to file the necessary paperwork with the SEC when he sold his interest in the company at considerable profit just before the enterprise crashed into the dust.

Bush’s other exploits, in no particular order, include a failed stint as CEO of a catering company owned by a group of his father’s wealthy friends, a major role in his father’s failed presidential campaign in 1992, and an aborted tour of duty in the Texas Air National Guard. This last item was a success not in that Bush earned any distinction as a pilot (though, fittingly, he seemed to have some natural talent for it) but in that it kept him away from the jungles of Vietnam, where many of his less fortunate contemporaries were busy dying in a war he and his father both supported, and continue to support to this day. As the son of an important politician, all Bush really had to do to succeed in the Guard was show up – but he failed to do even that.

As Governor of Texas, Bush succeeded in making a huge amount of money for himself and for his top financial backer, Ken Lay. By any other measure, however, Bush’s term-and-a-half as the state’s Chief Executive Officer – er, Chief Executive – was unremarkable. His greatest accomplishment was probably to compile such an atrocious environmental record that Texas is now home to several of the most polluted cities on the planet.

It was not until he assumed the Presidency, however, that Bush was able to fully demonstrate his particular knack for failure. At the helm of the world’s lone superpower, there is no safety net of rich oil men and well-connected parents to bail Bush out when he blunders. Slick political operators are employed to hide Bush’s failures from public view, but the mistakes cannot be erased with a check and a whisper, like hush money paid to some young woman Bush has impregnated on a wild bender.

No, Bush’s presidential failures are too obvious to conceal, even for the most shameless team of propagandists ever assembled in the history of this great nation. Elected on a promise that we could afford a tax cut and still keep Social Security solvent without returning the nation to deficit, Bush has managed in three short years to rack up the highest single-year deficit in the history of the United States. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are in trouble, not because of some inherent weakness in the system but because George W. Bush failed to protect them.

After the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, there was an unprecedented outpouring of goodwill from all over the world. We had the opportunity not only to mend tattered alliances with governments but to forge new bonds with the citizens of the world. Unfortunately, George W. Bush failed. Instead of using his position to unite all the globe's citizens, he squandered the opportunity so completely that now, less than two years later, the United States has never been more isolated among the world’s governments nor more hated among the people of the Earth.

It is telling that Bush’s supporters point to U.S. victories on the battlefield as Bush’s two major accomplishments as president. The military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have certainly been a bonanza for Bush’s contributors, who have reaped huge profits from these lethal adventures, and also for Bush himself, whose approval ratings seem to go up only when he declares war. Militarily, however, neither war achieved ANY of its stated objectives – even the ones that were added after the fact.

The Afghanistan war was originally supposed to be about getting Osama bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” but when that failed, Bush changed the objective to “getting rid of the hated Taliban.” Well, don’t look now, but the Taliban are still in charge throughout most of the country. The Karzai government Bush installed is, you guessed it, a failure.

In Iraq, we were going in to make sure that weapons of mass destruction didn’t fall into the hands of dangerous folks. Well, we’re in control of Iraq now, and unless those nuclear sites were looted by missionaries, we can safely assume that there are some dangerous people running around the Middle East with nuclear sludge as a result of our efforts. Meanwhile, it’s not clear that Saddam Hussein had any weapons that self-respecting terrorists would have wanted. The liberation of the Iraqi people from the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein is all well and good, of course, but as in Afghanistan, many of the people there are beginning to feel they have been liberated from the frying pan into the fire, since Bush failed to develop a coherent plan for the postwar occupation of Iraq, now quickly descending into madness.

I’m not sure if there really are any Democrats out there wishing for failure. If you are one of them, I’ve got good news – you can stop wishing. The failure is already here – his name is George W. Bush.