[Mb-civic] Stuck With BushBy BOB HERBERT

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Stuck With Bush
By BOB HERBERT

If George W. Bush could have been removed from office for being a bad
president, he would have been sent back to his ranch a long time ago.

If incompetence were a criminal offense, he'd be behind bars.

But that's just daydreaming. The reality is that there are more than two and
a half years left in the long dark night of the Bush presidency ‹ nearly as
long as the entire time John Kennedy was in office.

The nation seems, very belatedly, to be catching on to the tragic failures
and monumental ineptitude of its president. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are
abysmal. Republicans up for re-election are running from him as if he were
the bogyman.

Callers to conservative talk radio programs who were once ecstatic about the
president and his policies are now deeply disillusioned.

The libertarian Cato Institute is about to release a study titled "Power
Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush." It says,
"Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has
repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal
power." While I disagree with parts of the study, I certainly agree with
that particular comment.

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished
historian and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton
University, takes a serious look at the possibility that Mr. Bush may be the
worst president in the nation's history.

What in the world took so long? Some of us have known since the moment he
hopped behind the wheel that this reckless president was driving the nation
headlong toward a cliff.

The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of
deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq ‹ a war with no
end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and
inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries.

When he was a young man, Mr. Bush used the Air National Guard to hide out
from the draft in a time of war. Then, as president, he's suddenly G. I.
George, strutting around in a flight suit, threatening to wage war on all
and sundry, and taunting the insurgents in Iraq with a cry of "bring them
on."

When the nation needed leadership on the critical problem of global warming,
Mr. Bush took his cues from the honchos in the oil and gasoline industry,
the very people who were setting the planet on fire. Now he talks about
overcoming the nation's addiction to oil! This is amazing. Here's the
president of the United States scaling the very heights of chutzpah. The
Bush people and the oil people are indistinguishable. Condoleezza Rice, a
former Chevron director, even had an oil tanker named after her.

Among the complaints in the Cato study is that the Bush administration has
taken the position that despite validly enacted laws to the contrary, the
president cannot be restrained "from pursuing any tactic he believes to be
effective in the war on terror."

This view has led to activities that I believe have brought great shame to
the nation: the warrantless spying on Americans, the abuses at Abu Ghraib,
the creation of the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons, extraordinary
rendition and the barbaric encampment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in which
detainees are held, without regard to guilt or innocence, in a nightmarish
no man's land beyond the reach of any reasonable judicial process.

The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they
could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be
the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went
after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest
the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of
sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new
alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America
has morphed into outright hostility.

Remember Katrina?

The major task of Congress and the voters for the remainder of the Bush
presidency is to curtail the destructive impulses of this administration,
and to learn the lessons that will prevent similar horrors from ever
happening again.

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