Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite President Bush’s low approval ratings, people will soon “start to thank this president for what he’s done.”
CNN on-line article, December 29, 2008
Condoleeza Rice is living in a dream world of her own making. I can well understand Laura Bush supporting her husband’s work as she did within the past few days, but I cannot understand Condoleeza Rice’s defense. She ought to look around and take note of the fact that the rest of the Bush/Cheney Gang is keeping publicly silent. Silence would seem the better path for those who are responsible for the current mess.
Even if you could excuse her for the notion that Americans will be thanking Bush for the trillions spent, the deepening national debt, the incalculable damage to our Bill of Rights, and the disaster that is our economy, the above comment isn’t Ms. Rice’s greatest howler. In the same CNN article, she states:
“This isn’t a popularity contest. I’m sorry, it isn’t. What the administration is responsible to do is to make good choices about Americans’ interests and values in the long run — not for today’s headlines, but for history’s judgment,”
I only agree with that part of her comment that indicates this isn’t a popularity contest. As much as I don’t like President Bush for his personal mannerisms, arrogance and ignorance, I am already positive that I will detest his legacy since I will have to live with it for some time to come. I am far less concerned about what a historian may say in 50 years about the Bush/Cheney presidency than I am about how to deal presently with the wreckage of my retirement plans.
To make it explicitly clear, I hold President Bush personally responsible for the actions, inactions, omissions and moral vacuity that led to the current state of affairs. He cannot hide behind the excuse of market forces or matters beyond his control to explain away this legacy; he was in charge and either established or maintained the polices that led to the current debacle. He cannot blame Cheney for the damage to our Bill of Rights, since he selected the man for the Vice Presidency -not once, but twice – thereby explicitly condoning, if not actively complicit in, its disembowelment.
George Bush frittered away his time in office on vacations while our Bill of Rights, the economy and the Middle East burned. If only he had learned to play the violin!
From the standpoint of history the worst legacy the Bush/Cheney Gang leaves for America is not the state of the economy, but the damage to our Bill of Rights. Economies fluctuate up and down and periodically go into recession, and then usually recover and remain generally strong for some period of time. I suspect the same thing will happen to this mess, and that we will eventually recover and move on. In so saying, I do realize that depressions happen as well, but I have faith in the incoming President to help us avoid a depression. Suffice it to say that I have all fingers, toes, and eyes crossed in support of the hoped for truth of that statement. I would also cross any other crossable body part in support of this theory, but I am unable to identify any that qualify.
The damage done to our Bill of Rights has a much longer tail of associated ill effects than does the economy. Future Congresses will have to spend significant time and energy to repeal the bad laws of the previous Congress. Because of the nature of the judicial process, the courts grind slowly in their attempts to support civil liberties and it may be years before they are through with the litigation backlog that presently exists and which will be forthcoming under a new administration. The executive branch of government has its own work to do in the form of undoing regulations and presidential decrees, and it cannot undo them all with a single stroke of the pen on Inauguration Day. By the time each of the branches of our government do their work, an entire generation of young Americans will have lived under policies that we wouldn’t have tolerated a decade ago. They will know no better and will have to be convinced that there once was a better world.
It is the gradual erosion of rights over time that is the greatest worry for me, since any time you take away civil rights and people adjust to a new reality it becomes harder to win back the lost rights. The will to take back civil liberties doesn’t normally appear in the general populace until such time as civil liberty denials are egregious and excessive and affect almost everyone to the point that they are living in fear. Gradual erosion is, in the minds of most people, not worth fighting for because, after all, life can go on and we aren’t entirely a police state. The energy and will it takes to rise up against a despotic government is not easy to elicit, and it generally takes a revolution to accomplish it.
Meanwhile, it is hard to drum up enthusiasm among the general populace for those who continue the fight to protect against the erosion of our civil liberties. In fact, organizations who do this, like the ACLU, are often seen as vaguely unpatriotic by many since their efforts are misunderstood. People tend to identify with the government in power – after all, it was elected in an open vote – and organizations such as the ACLU seem to many to be subversive of that government’s legitimate power. If only the voters could learn to appreciate that the incremental loss of civil liberties is worse than a wholesale suspension of our Bill of Rights, in the sense that the former can occur with little fanfare and with general acceptance and approval and last for an extended period of time while the latter would likely spark a revolution which would immediately overturn the loss.
So we have work to do – hard, slogging work that begins when George W. Bush leaves office in January. I am very thankful he is leaving, but I am not thankful for what he has left us.
Goodbye George, and good riddance to you.
