08/19/09 Vancouver, British Columbia
I recognize that I’ve antagonized many of my subscribers over the years with “Bush Bashing.” In January, just after OBAMA!’s election, I said I wouldn’t mention Bush again, his departure having made him irrelevant. I only feel bad that he and his minions will apparently get away scot-free with their crimes; better they had all been brought up before a tribunal and tried for crimes against humanity in general and the US Constitution in particular. But that is objectively true of almost all presidents since at least Lincoln.
Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals – i.e., people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual. The next largest group are “conservatives.” It’s a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It’s unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.
Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere. Bush’s tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton’s eloquence, which made him look “slick.”
I’m forced to the conclusion that what “conservatives” like about Bush is his style, such as it was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.
Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I’d say he’s a strong contender. He started out with a gigantic lie – that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay out of foreign wars – and things got much worse from there. Let’s look at just some of the highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.
- No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.
- Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like 20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.
- Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities laws since the ’30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public outside the US.
- Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.
- Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush’s encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.
- Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in US history (until OBAMA!).
- Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush appeared on camera, they’re now used to herd.
- The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects. Warrantless searches. All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.
- The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It’s become a cause of mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.
- Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless, counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of ending anytime soon.
- Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes the functions of a police state.
- Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an “enemy combatant” to be completely deprived of any rights at all.
- Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals, Bush made it a US policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or nothing but a guard’s whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the reputation of the US ever. It says to the world, “We stand for nothing.”
- The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on this list, and it’s still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other purposes in the future…
- The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing to go through their fellow citizens’ dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God forbid you’re not polite to them…
- Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.
- Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president in history.
The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not “evil” (to use a word he favored), completely uninformed, or thoughtless would favor Bush is because he wasn’t a Democrat. Not that there’s any real difference between the two parties anymore…
As disastrous as he was, I rather hate to put him in competition for “worst president” in the company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is simply too small a character – psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow, duplicitous, small-minded – to merit inclusion in any list. On second thought, looking over that list of his personal characteristics, he’s probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR’s polish and rhetorical skills. I suspect he’ll just fade away as a non-entity, recognized as an embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of hanging by his heels from a lamppost, although Americans aren’t (yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once supported him will, at least if they have any circumspection and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim they were to have been duped by a nobody.
The worst shame of Bush – worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars – is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it.
And he’s left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.
Regards,
Doug Casey
for The Daily Reckoning
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sucks to be u with such a twisted frame of reference as the hick from Arkansas
I agree completely. I would just note that Bush was conservative in the same way that Kennedy (John) was liberal.
It seems to much to ask of the American population to actually pay attention to what the policies proposed are…and O, maybe that 2 plus 2 isn’t 12, or a zillion.
Really, really good essay. Mr. Casey does a service by showing the ambiguous nature of the term “conservative.” This has been a thorn in my side for years.
the author is displaying vapid ignorance to claim that he doesn’t know what a conservative is in the same breath that he claims to know what a liberal is….his summation of liberalism is no more sophisticated than agitprop from mother earth news…casey is a 3d rate intellect through and through….
on the other hand, i find myself in agreement with the 3d rate intellect on many deficiencies of baby bush who was doing the bidding of the bush crime syndicate which explains in part his tortured grammar – a sign of enormous mental stress and lying….
fdr (liberal, mr casey) was by far the worst president, followed by wilson, baby bush, johnson, nixon
the only thing which casey did not nail bush for was the destruction of the world trade centers which is too bad because that is bush’s primary legacy – the controlled demolition of the wtc with military grade explosive nanothermite….
The only paragraph of substance in this rant was the last paragraph.
“Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.”
Mr. Casey should move on. He states Bush’s departure made him irrelevant. Point taken. It would be better to use his energy to expose our new collectivist in chief who will be much worse for our Constitutional Republic going forward than any of his predecessors. Who needs a Nero when you have an Obama?
Mr Bonn is a conspiracy idiot. The author of the article sounds like a typical Bush hater (not that I’m here to sing his praises)…. why are we delving into this in the Reckoning pages anyway? If I wanted to read/listen to this crap, I’d watch MSNBC.
The comments here are quite interesting. I can’t see why we would include the Roosevelts, Lincoln and McKinley among the ranks of the worst presidents ever. I would agree that Bush will probably be forgotten by history. I also agree that I am a bit unclear as to the so called conservative philosophy: why do these tea party people get so angry that a kid might get a reduced price school lunch or a Burger King worker might get health insurance, but, at the same time, they aren’t infuriated about the handouts to the banks and Wall Street? Why do they advocate a return to the values of the constitution but support the War on Terror and hate the ACLU? But, I guess, I could say the same of liberals. How can they stand behind Obama after his secret deal with pharma lobbyists, his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his continuation of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo? It seems our two party/one party system has reached its dramatic final act.
Mr Casey, you seem to have missed the fundamental law on Presidents. Namely that every president is worse than the one before. Bill Clinton was worse than George Bush Snr, G.W. Bush was worse than Clinton, and now Obama is worse than than baby Bush. The one fundamental thing you can count on in politics.
The reason he points this out is so idiot Republicans can learn that their party is no better then Democrats. In some ways I find Republicans even worse as they tend to be govt spending hypocrites. Until America wakes up to this fact we will continue this blame game distraction.
boring
“It seems our two party/one party system has reached its dramatic final act.”
Indeed it has. Both parties are two sides to the same bad coin. Neither uphold the US Constitution and are only concerned about retaining their power over the subjects and forcing us all to become economic serfs to the government with the help of those traitorous bastards at the Federal Reserve. The current crop of Congress critters is an absolute disgrace to the founding fathers of this nation and a stain on the hollowed institution that we allow them to work in. It is imperative that they be fired in 2010/2012.
You forgot the fact that he failed to ensure a real investigation into 9/11. And was probably involved in it.
I, after long revisiting, concluded I am a conservative liberal.
That means general I’m a liberal, willing to question everything and not afraid of change. However, I will not ignore histories lessons when evaluating possible changes and give into wishful thinking instead of hard facts or “it’s different this time” swipes, like most self-named “liberals” do nowadays.
Great article by the way.
Wow. So FDR, who won WWII, and arguably salvaged American existence during the great Depression, is a “terrible” president?
And Lincoln, who preserved our nation during the Civil War, and is recognized by serious historians as one of our greatest presidents rivaled only by George Washington, is in GWB’s company as “worst”?
This is the first article I’ve read by Mr. Casey. I hope it’s the last.
“Preserved our nation?” hahaha if anything he destroyed the Union. When he made membership in the Union compulsory it was no longer a union. He got the ball rolling for the erosion of states sovereignty. He single-handedly, and for egotistical reasons, destroyed the Founding Fathers’ vision for America.
History Lover,
I don’t know how much I buy into your name “History Lover.” If you don’t recognize that FDR and Lincoln were two of our worst Presidents, it would suggest one of two things. Either:
(a) You really don’t know your history
or
(b) You like the destruction of personal freedom and those who use crises to forward their own personal anti-Constitutional agendas
Why go on to knock Obama, when he inherited eight years of damage to the nation, mindless muck and international GWB-Disaster?
A conservative supports individual freedom and responsibility, limited government, free markets, lowest possible taxation, and a literal interpretation of the Constitution. What is so hard to understand about that?
No doubt Bush was as fault. But to omit the Senate and House from this article is stupid. Checks and balances. They all, we all, or at least should, be help accoutnable, down here in the USA. Worst president, senate and house, bottom line.
Sorry about the spelling. In a hurry.
To discover what a conservative is, Mssr. Casey needs only to read Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin. It will become crystal clear…..
What a fantastic article by Doug Casey. This sums up the Bush years perfectly. People need to wake up and realize that the government is not here to help, and like Doug says, the 2 parties are pretty much the same anyway. Voting doesn’t work, so we have to reject government itself at all costs. You think Bush was bad? Just give Obama a chance. You think Obama is bad? Just give the next guy a chance to be even worse.
Keep up the good work on getting the truth out DC!
Mr Casy makes a very compelling case. I voted for Bush twice, as I did Nixon. Maybe my right to vote should be rescinded. Like most people, just busy making a living, I have allowed politicians to push my emotional buttons, rather than pay attention to what exactly are they doing.
“Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling for George W. Bush?”
ARGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!!! This liberal mantra drivel is really getting old. Conservatives NEVER felt warm & fuzzy about W. He was the lesser of two evils: Gore & Kerry
Obviously Casey is truly ignorant about conservative philosophy. That says a lot about the quality of education at Georgetown.
if we keep up this stupid liberal vs. conservative bipolar approach it will be replaced with a new bipolar: armed vs. unarmed, or more specifically quick vs. dead. At least then we will have a decisive winner. I suggest we stop blaming people, even if they deserve it, and instead seek to work together to repair our nation if possible. Short of that prepare to survive and attempt remain on the side of the “quick”. Get with it!
The Bush haters will remain so. Congress was mostly democrat and shares the responsibility equally. Comments are mostly gibberish. Comparisons with other presidents are irrelevant. Improper use of the Language, who cares? I understood what he said. Obama is the height of obfusication(sp)!!
For Bush’s first six years he had a Republican House and Senate and never used one veto. Yet somehow people think that blame should be shared? Share it with Rush Limbaugh and the other enablers who made possible this sorry piece of American history.
You epitomize , you are the ultimate example of why america is ending its time as a world leader and becoming a 4th world country .A detailed explanation is a waist of time because LIBERALS like you are unable to understand freedom ,personal responsibility and reality .You people live in some parallel universe where you can create a new reality any moment you wish .Of course this all translates into profound ignorance from which you cannot recover .I suspect that the fundamental reason liberals are such is a genetic mutation which actually reverses evolution and sends humans back toward living in trees .
We need To finally admit that we are past the ability of one person to handle the decisions of the President. Though I would hate to open the can of worms of a constitutional convention, we need to have more of a benevolent dictator approach with a reasonable committee that plans solutions to long term problems of our world, our country, and matters that affect my family. Eventhough I believe in small government, small taxes, and a strong dollar, some communal matters require sounder logic than what our executive, judicial, and congressional branches have shown me in the last 60+ years.
all of this blame game is part of the problem, NOT part of the solution(s). we need large numbers of experts (non elected-qualified experts} to untangle the pile of waste that has been created by politicians that are nothing more than unqualified amateurs (dinosaurs) that have re-election funding (aka Lobbyist) as their main goal. maybe we need a”keep your Job” Panel to evaluate whether politicians are a drag to our economy ?
Dougy, agreed, Bush was an inept scumbag, second only to Jimmy Carter as a national disgrace. You, I hasten to add, are a pathetic stock analyst and a wannabe progressive, drowning in a sea of your own vomit.
I agree with Mr Casey on each point. The only thing he left out is that neither the President, the Congress,or the Judiciary are in charge. The whole country is run by Wall Street and the Pentagon.
Interesting, reading the contra-Casey comments here, ripe with vicious personal attacks while being void of substance or intelligent debate.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, being a strong Casey advocate.
Is this the same Doug Casey who many years ago sent financial advisary letters to his customers for a pricey cost? Most, if not all of his advice, was off the track and useless.
After many months of subscribing I finally cancelled. I can’t understand why this man with such a track record is still in the business. W.
All these amazing insights……! Now I’m totally confused…..
They Are Not Conservatives!!!
The reason many self proclaimed conservatives love Baby Doc Bush is because niether they not Baby Doc are conservatives. True conservatives believe in things like the Constitution, separation of powers, individual rights,a balanced (and preferably modest) budget, the rights of towns and states to run their own affairs, etc.
Bush paid lip service to all these and did the exact opposite. he presided over the biggest expansion of govt. since WWII, ran deficits of 480,000,000,000 a year, doubled the national debt, shredded the Constitution, etc ad nauseum. He isnt a Conservative, he is a Fascist, as Mussolini defined Fascism. Ina nutshell Fascism is an authoritarian and imperialististic form of Crony Capitolism, and Crony Capitolism is what the Bush dynasty and its equally corrupt pals have allways been about. Read up on Granpa Prescott sometime-he was in bed with the Nazis, and put Saddam Hussien in power.
I disagree with Mr Casey. The worst president I can remember is Jimmy Carter.
And Lincoln was bad ’cause…….???
Seems to me an “oxymoronic” list of presidents, Mr Casey
To describe Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as “bad presidents” because they seized “personal liberty”, supposedly contrary to the Founders of the Constitution, indicates that Mr. Casey picks and chooses the parts of the Constitution he likes, and discards the rest. Conservatives love to cite parts of the Bill of Rights and Amendments that suit their purpose, but the founders established a central government, a congress with inherent powers, and a judiciary to resolve disputes between various states, entities, and citizens. The Constitution was ratified by the people and is still intact. The secession by South Carolina, even Lincoln patiently hoped that the South would come to its senses, was lost when rebel forces bombarded Fort Sumter, a Federal military facility. In any country, that isn’t freedom, it’s called insurrection or rebellion. Perhaps Mr. Casey thinks that the Whiskey Rebellion, quelled by Washington, was American fascism. If so, his concept of the United States permits open definance of laws already discerned as constitutional, simply because they interfere with his personal concept of “freedom”. Few countries permit such a wide-ranging latitude on personal actions and mobility and wealth accumulation as the United States. Perhaps he has bank accounts at UBS?
Christopher Hahin
“The secession by South Carolina, even Lincoln patiently hoped that the South would come to its senses, was lost when rebel forces bombarded Fort Sumter, a Federal military facility. In any country, that isn’t freedom, it’s called insurrection or rebellion.”
To paraphrase George C. Scott in Patton,
You know as much about the Constitution as you do about fornication.
The states created the federal government!
The states had every Constitutional right to leave the federal government.
Disagree? Enlighten us. Where in the Constitution do the states surrender their independence to the federal government? Where is secession outlawed?
To JMR Coy Lewis:
Your comment about fornication shows where your mind plays upon. That aside, where in the Constitution does it permit a state to attack the United States of which it is a part of? By being part of the United States, it adheres to the Constitution. Only Amendment X states that “powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.” Apparently it is the argument of Southerners like yourself that insurrection and secession, because they are not specifically cited, are permissible. However, read Article IV, Section 3, which states that “Congress shall have Power to dispose and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States…” Fort Sumter was the property of the United States, not South Carolina; so also were the many military and Federal facilities seized by the Confederates during the Civil War. Read Article III Section 3: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them…” If succession is not mentioned in the Constitution, how can it be a “right”? The actions of the South in their aim to preserve the decaying tradition of slavery brought upon the worst conflict in American history, and people like yourself are still trying to justify it.
Mr Hahin,
A nice overall piece of demagogery.
You write, “if succession is not mentioned in the Constitution, how can it be a “right”?
Using that logic the “right” to privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution nor, the “right” to abortion. Would you deny these “rights”?
To “Live Free or Die”, “privacy” is defined in Amendment IV of the Constitution, whereby “The right of the people to be secure in their houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches, shall not be violated…” With respect to abortion, you are correct that there is no direct citation. However, if the woman’s life is in jeopardy, she is protected by Amendment V where no person shall “…be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law;…” Therefore if a State like South Dakota, which is planning to forbid any abortion, and makes the surgical procedure a crime, its law is unconstitutional, because in certain cases, the unavailability of abortion could endanger the life of the woman. If she was raped, her life and liberty is also protected by this fundamental right.