Today, President Obama and all four living ex-presidents will be present at the inauguration of the $500 million
George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. No matter what he does, President Bush will certainly go down in history as the president that nearly destroyed America and her standing as the leader of the free world.
While George vacationed at his Texas ranch, it was Vice President Dick Cheney that took control of our country and nearly ran it into the ground. When President Obama assumed office, President Bush bequeath to him an economy that was shedding almost 800,000 jobs per month, a financial sector in a free-fall, and staggering federal, state and local deficits.
Incredibly, in the five short years since his presidency, the mainstream media and the Republican Party have done such a good job of whitewashing history that today President Bush’s popularity is even with President Obama’s
at 47%.
While Republicans are betting that America’s collective amnesia will be strong enough to wipe out the memory of President Bush’s catastrophic 8 years, it is up to the American left to refresh her memory. Here are the top 20 reasons why George destroyed America, in no particular order:
1. To begin with, his brother Jeb and the American Supreme Court stole the presidency on his behalf in 2000. Jeb, the Governor of Florida at the time, cynically blocked more than 50,000 African-American voters from voting, then refused to allow a simple recount of the Florida votes after tens of thousands of complaints regarding voter difficulties at the voting booth due to confusing ballots. Several major national news organizations have verified that, had the votes been recounted, VP Al Gore
would have won the presidency rather than President Bush.
2. He pulled the United States out of the Kyoto protocol. Stunting global environmental progress, he pulled America out of the agreement which set requirements for 38 large nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions in order to combat climate change. His reason for doing so? That the agreement would
“harm our economy and hurt our workers.”
3.
He ignored several warnings about Osama bin Laden. On August 6, 2001, White House intelligence presented to him a brief titled,
“Bin Laden determined to strike in the US”. Of course, he ignored his duties as chief executive and failed to heed the warnings, paving the way for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack us on 9/11.
4.
He escalated the war on drugs, incarcerating minorities at a record pace for nonviolent, drug related offenses.
5. He wasted international goodwill after the 9/11 attacks. Instead of embracing the help of our major allies, he declared a global war on terrorism and stated,
“you are either with us or against us“. For this reason, many of our major allies refused to join us in our preemptive war against Iraq.
6. President Bush and his administration carefully
deceived America by creating a false narrative that Iraq was an ally of Afghanistan in their war of terror against the U.S., and that they posed an imminent threat as a part of the concocted
“Axis of Evil”.
7. He cynically lied about the scope and magnitude of Iraq’s weapons. In one of his most
infamous speeches during the run-up to the Iraq war, President Bush declared in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to send unmanned aircraft to United States with bombs capable of unleashing chemical weapons and nuclear devices on the American homeland
.
8. He ignored the United Nations and launched an illegal preemptive war. After they failed to get the UN Security Council to authorize an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration decided to lead America into a reckless preemptive war. He also declared the war
without congressional approval, and even went as far as keeping the United States from ratifying the International Criminal Court Treaty in order to protect American troops from prosecution.
9. He escalated a war on CIA whistle-blowers. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Joseph C. Wilson, a writer for the New York Times, penned an Op-Ed saying that there was no credible nuclear threat from Iraq. In retaliation, the White House responded by
leaking the name and endangering the life of his wife, Valerie Plame, one of the CIA’s top national security experts. Of course, President Bush went on to exonerate the staffer that leaked Plame’s name to the press, Scooter Libby.
10. President Bush launched the ill-advised, reckless, and unnecessary Iraq War. Not only did it decrease America’s standing in the world, but it
led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, more than 1 million refugees being ripped from their homes, and thousands of American military casualties.
11. When attacking Iraq, the Bush Pentagon failed to declare martial law, and did not secure anything except the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers took to the streets in protest, looted the National Museum, and terrorized the Iraqi people as the American soldiers looked on.
12. Cynical war profiteering. The American taxpayers were forced to foot the bill for hundreds of no-bid contracts to some of the world’s most powerful military contractors. VP Dick Cheney and his company Halliburton made a healthy
$39.5 billion profit.
13. He destroyed America’s standing in the world by ignoring the international ban on torture. While ignoring several agreements, namely the
Geneva Convention, the Pentagon created a network of secret prisons and detention centers, where American soldiers tortured and mistreated suspected terrorists. The Bush White House then created secret detention sites in Eastern Europe in order to evade traditional justice systems.
14. Bush created spiraling federal deficits. After President Clinton handed him an annual budget surplus, President Bush single-handedly drove our country into that by creating the three biggest drivers of federal debt: the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and Medicare part D. according to a recent report by a Harvard researcher, the total costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars will end up being somewhere between
$4 and $6 trillion.
15. He instated the reckless and unnecessary Bush tax cuts. The biggest experiment in supply-side trickle down economics in history, the Bush tax cuts resulted in catastrophe, blowing a hole in the federal budget and leading to unprecedented social economic inequality.
16. Bush fought a drastic war on science. Whether blocking stem cell research, loosening environmental regulations,
saying that evolution is a theory, and
cutting Pell Grants, President Bush never stopped trying to make America dumber and less healthy.
17. Bush destroyed the American middle-class. Median household incomes declined by 4.2%, social economic inequality reached epidemic proportions, and the middle-class took on more debt than at any time since the Great Depression.
His policies led to 8 million Americans falling below the poverty line, 3.5 million of those being children.
18. President Bush and his policies led to the 2007 Great Recession. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve stood idly by while the big banks created a $600,000,0000,000,000 mortgage-backed derivatives bubble that burst and brought down the global economy.
19. While going on a record number of vacations and holding a record-setting least number of press conferences,
President Bush unleashed Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz upon the American people. This was the first time that the neoconservative warhawks were able to fully take control of the American government and implement their military/corporatist empire.
20. Unlike President Obama, President Bush
stood by and watched as 35 million uninsured Americans risked death and financial ruin without proper and affordable health care.
http://aattp.org/the-top-20-ways-president-bush-destroyed-america/
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