After watching the liberals trash President Bush for virtually everything that happened during his presidency it is hard to resist trying to put his presidency into better perspective.
I feel that with the passage of time President Bush’s presidency will look a lot better than it does right now. The main media have spent so much effort badmouthing him that the man on the street has no idea of what was good and what was bad about President Bush. All they ever heard was the bad. Anything good was omitted.
Let's start with the things he did which appear to have been good and then go to the things that he did that appear to have been bad.
# The war in Iraq seems to have gone reasonably well. Since the media has quit covering it , it must be going well. It remains to be seen if we can maintain the win. I fear the Democrats will throw it away.
# The war on terror appears to be successful although it is way too early to make any permanent declarations in that area. .
# Bush did a good job of staying the course and doing what he thought was best for the country in the face of a never ending, often baseless barrage of flack from the opposition.
# The Bush tax cuts were a real boost to the country’s economy.
# Most of the people he appointed to fill important posts were very capable.
# The economy was helped by the diminution in feckless lawsuits against big business.
# The creation and extension of health savings accounts has the potential to greatly help our medical cost problems.
Bush’s most serious policy error was the excess creation of money and credit. This easy money policy has contributed substantially to our present economic problems.
Failure to veto so many useless spending bills hurt the country and helped get Republicans unelected. The bills that needed vetoing and probably will need vetoing in the future are too numerous to mention. However, in general, almost all spending bills should be vetoed as they do nothing to help the country in general.
One non-spending bi
ll that cried for a veto was the McCain-Feingold bill on election reform. This horrible bill runs contrary to our rights to free speech. Bush evidently thought the Supreme Court would overturn it and he would not appear to be against election reform. How wrong he was.
The tariffs on imported steel were a colossal blunder.
President Bush failed to communicate. Quite often he would take a lot of unwarranted flack over things he did right and assumed that doing the right thing would suffice to speak for itself.. He should have taken a tip from President Reagan and grabbed the presidential pulpit to answer to his critic’s unwarranted attacks.
Under the category of things that need doing but weren’t -- we have the Social Security system. The Democrats think the present Social Security system is helping to get them elected and have pigheadedly blocked all attempts to fix the system.
His failure to make his tax cuts permanent are already hurting the economy as investors are running for cover because they expect the present regime to let the tax cuts expire. Here again the opposition may have made permanent tax cuts impossible..
As the years go by, it will become much clearer which things President George W. Bush did were good and which things were not so good.