George W. Bush’s Legacy
May 9th, 2008 by joe
Our friend LI at Too Conservative has a great discussion going about George W. Bush’s legacy. Here is my take:
Toppling Saddam was the right thing to do, in my view, but handling the occupation with military-lite was a really bad idea. We started “rebuilding” before our soldiers had put the hammer down on all the bad guys. “Rules of engagement” … whatever happened to WINNING. The war should have been fought less like Vietnam and more like “Devil’s Guard” by Elford. Don’t get me started …
On the other hand, we have not been attacked on American soil in roughly 6.5 years. Our men and women are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. Bush has delivered on homeland security.
On the OTHER hand, as a relative who is pretty non-political but leans conservative said to me, “I don’t know why we have our young men and women over there dying for those people.”
There is a strong sense among many Americans the money and blood America has contributed to securing Iraq is looking like a questionable investment considering what the Iraqis themselves are contributing. Let’s be blunt: They don’t seem worth it. This may be unfair, but the perception is they don’t care enough to fix their own country so how can we fix it for them.
The resolution of this whole war with the religious fanatics we no longer are supposed to identify by name will be years in the future, and I agree Bush’s legacy on this issue will be determined by how it ends.
But right here and now, why the hell are we spending billions of dollars a month to rebuild and secure Iraq when they are sitting on an ocean of oil? If the Democrats had managed to nominate someone without the crushing negatives of Barack Obama, I would say they win in November in a walk just by repeating the above sentence over and over.
On the OTHER hand, Bush did well with his Supreme Court appointments. In fact, he did phenomenally well. He did much better than his dad. The only way W could have done better would have been if he’d been able to make another appointment. Platinum legacy on this issue.
But on the ultimate, final, this-is-it-and-no-tag-backs hand, Bush was a disaster on illegal immigration. Previous recent presidents were no great shakes on immigration enforcement, but the Bush administration turned a blind eye, opened the floodgates, and cut our enforcement agencies off at the knees for years.
As an example, the illegal invasion of Herndon began under Clinton, but hastened greatly under Bush. The invasion of Sterling, as with so many American communities, was 100% on George W. Bush’s watch, after word got around in the business community that Title 8 of the U.S. code was now officially classified under: fuhgetaboudit.
People say, well GW Bush has ALWAYS said he’s in favor of free flow of people and goods across our border with Mexico, so anyone who is disappointed with how his executive branch managed immigration enforcement simply was not listening when Bush was working his way up the ranks. Fair enough. So we can’t nail him for being duplicitous, and shame on us for not calling him out on it before he became, er, president of the United States. But his policy of allowing a massive increase of illegal immigration was a bad one and the results have been bad, and his legacy will reflect this terrible public policy mistake.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Bloggers, Homeland Security, Politics, immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 10th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
joe,
the lesson here is to act locally. Due to the in/action of Capitol Hill we are now blessed with a border that is so porous that it is facilitating/encouraging illegal immigration and a severly broken USCIS which has all but shut down legal immigration. Best we can do is hold our local politicians’ feet to the fire. We have to ensure that they follow the Virginia statutes which prohibit localities from providing tax funded social services to people who are not legal residents of Virginia.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
With you on that, Geez. You all in Herndon are a bit better off on that front, however, since you have the power to elect your own government.
We in Sterling can do little more than elect one of a jumble of Supervisors, most of whom rate the illegal alien problem at the same priority level as whooping cough.
May 11th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Mark this down, he, “GWB” will go down as one of the worst presidents in HISTORY! Oh, one of the dumbest too! LOL and YOU all voted for him LOL!!!!
Lord have mercy on you all!
May 12th, 2008 at 8:52 am
BJ,
you are nothing more than a drive by troll. Come in, say something stupid, then type ‘LOL’, like it means something in this context. You never answer the questions that inevitably follow such callowness. Dork.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:57 am
What really drives the libs nuts is that this “stupid” president managed to beat them — TWICE.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:12 am
was not his GPA higher than either Kerry or Gore’s?
May 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
My GPA is higher than Kerry’s or Gore’s. It doesn’t take brains to be president. Look at the crop running now. “Anyone that ain’t liberal is “stupid” I believe is the point.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Yes, I think W’s GPA was higher than either of his opponents. Gore flunked out of Yale Divinity School, right?
May 12th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Does this prove that a GPA is not necessarily a valid indicator of innate intelligence I wonder ?
While W has not arisen to my expectations, I shudder to think where we would be with Al Gore, or Teresa Kerry (oops, I meant to say John) in the Oval Office.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Dan, I think we all know people that had excellent grades in school, and function well in an academic environment but have very little common sense or “real world” knowledge. I’ll take an average student with a good head on his shoulders over a Phi-Beta-Kappa beanhead that spends all his time with his head in a book and misses out on the world around him.
My apologies to all the Phi Betta Kappas out there, this was merely an example, not a blanket stmt.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Slam on you, Joe. Or is Phi Beta Kappa a sorority?
May 12th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
It’s not a slam on anyone in particular, is Joe a Phi-Beta-Kappa? I added a disclaimer.
I guess a better description is book vs street smarts. We don’t need a President that knows how to make an nuclear bomb, we need one that knows when/if to use it.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Phi Beta Kappa? What’s that, street slang?
June 6th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Wow, such great comments from all involved!!! Sorry I wasn’t around on May 12th to add my two cents!
I love George W and I’ll miss him. His legacy will be determined years from now as was Regan’s and Clinton’s. I think he it will be revealed that he saved a lot of Americans on American soil, and that is going to be his legacy. It’s how he will be remembered.