Successes Of The Bush Administration

One question keeps popping into my head amidst all of the posturing with regard to various issues in this election year: What has the Bush administration accomplished in the last three-and-a-half years that warrants being given four more years in the White House?

Certainly the economic picture hasn't been all that notable. While job creation has improved recently, Bush's job creation stats (according to the United States Department of Labor, December 2003) are pretty flimsy when compared to past presidents. (Actually, Republicans in general don't quite measure up.)

Roosevelt (D) +5.3%
Johnson (D) +3.8%
Carter (D) +3.1%
Truman (D) +2.5%
Clinton (D) +2.4%
Kennedy (D) +2.3%
Nixon (R) +2.2%
Reagan (R) +2.1%
Coolidge (R) +1.1%
Ford (R) +1.1%
Eisenhower (R) +0.9%
G. Bush (R) +0.6%
G.W. Bush (R) -0.7%
Hoover (R) -9.0%

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that hourly wages are not keeping up with inflation.

What is there, then, for Bush to run on?

Education? I think not!

Is the removal of Saddam Hussein from power reason enough to support him? There really seems to be very, very little on which to make a case for Bush's re-election [sic] once you remove the Saddam story from the mix. If indeed his overthrow can be considered an accomplishment, how does the war stack up with a cost/benefit analysis?

Bush has spent nearly 125 billion dollars and sent almost 900 of our children, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers to their deaths. Almost 5300 have been wounded, with less than half of them returning to action. Of course, the extent of their wounds and injuries -- and their subsequent costs (financially and emotionally) -- will likely never be demonstrated well with statistics.

Will a tangible benefit ever be realized? The war in Iraq has been a very high-risk, low-yield proposition.

With Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction argument all but put to rest; with the 9/11 Commission's findings that there was no significant connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11, Bush has begun campaigning on the premise that the United States and the world are safer with a Saddam Hussein-less Iraq.

It's fruitless, of course, to say it now, but I would have been a hell of a lot more convinced that this nation's security was a priority of this administration had Bush paid attention to Richard Clarke's proposal for a Department of Homeland Security prior to September 11, or had he seriously considered the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief.

Later this week, Stephen Flynn, a former national security official in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, releases America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism:

"Despite all the rhetoric, after the initial flurry of activity to harden cockpit doors and confiscate nail clippers, there has been little appetite in Washington to move beyond government reorganization and color-coded alerts."

"The measures we have been cobbling together are hardly fit to deter amateur thieves, vandals, and hackers, never mind determined terrorists."

Had Bush's response even slightly resembled Clinton's when he was given a similar PDB, perhaps I could trust him with our security.

A report by the presidential commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will include the newly declassified document and a previously declassified PDB from Aug. 6, 2001, when it is released this week. It also will contain details of what the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, described Saturday as an "energetic response" to the hijack threat information by the Clinton administration, including its efforts to determine if the reports were true.

It's easy for Bush to claim he's doing everything to protect us now, but I'm not convinced. Even on the morning of September 11, 2001 -- as the World Trade Center signalled to the world just how vulnerable we were -- our security was a mere afterthought, held hostage by a photo opportunity.



With much of America behind him after September 11 (hell, most of America would have been behind Richard Simmons after that day!), Bush failed to be the uniter he claimed he would be, by pulling troops out of Afghanistan before we'd accomplished the mission of capturing Osama bin Laden, the true perpetrator of the attacks.




So, as this one "accomplishment" goes, when you consider the vast difference in might between the United States military and that of Iraq's prior to the war, I'd suggest that ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein was about as formidable a task as the New York Yankees might face in playing a Little League team.

Except that our closer hasn't been able to get the damned ball over the plate!

It's time to make a call to the bullpen.