Missing The Point

Now that the Democrats have won, the "Stop picking on Bush!" movement from the Sensible Centrists of the Village is now picking up steam. The explanation for 8 years of the worst President ever? Why, it's not his fault at all: Bush was just really unlucky.

But like so many presidents before him, Bush's reputation could change with time.

Harvard University political history scholar Barbara Kellerman said when President-elect Barack Obama takes over in January, people may view Bush in a new light.

"I think it's possible when people have stopped being as angry at the Bush administration as they are now ... that they will realize that some of this is just ... the luck of the draw."

Kellerman, author of the book "Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters," noted that Bush has not had luck on his side for the past eight years.

"He's [Bush] has been a quite unlucky president. Certain things happened on his watch that most people don't have to deal with -- a 9/11, a [Hurricane] Katrina, the financial crisis, being three obvious examples," she said.

"And yet they happened on his watch. He is being blamed," she said.

Is she angling for a job at the Bush Presidential Library or what?

Put aside the very real evidence that Bush helped bring about 9/11 and the financial crisis we're currently stuck in. Even if you consider them to be unlucky disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the reason he's going down as the Worst President Ever(tm) is strictly due to his reactions to these events -- the conscious choices he made and did not make -- that made every one of these problems orders of magnitude worse. His choices were not "bad luck". They were bad choices.

To blame the consequences of Bush's bad choices and the outcome of these events on luck is intellectually dishonest and pretty goddamn stupid. Bush's bad choices in the financial crisis are still being determined, but his reaction to Katrina was cold and calculated neglect designed to make Louisiana the red state it is today, minus a few hundred thousand black faces. And 9/11? His reaction was to invade the wrong country and embroil us in two ridiculous wars, all while failing to find the man responsible and spending $3 trillion, thousand of American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistan lives to do it. There was no luck involved there.

But it's fun to throw all that aside and feel sorry for Bush, apparently. No folks, he earned the epithet as the Worst President Ever...the only thing he ever earned in his life.