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21 Jan 2009
2 comments

The 400 Bush Scandals

The over­whelming quan­tity of Bush admin­is­tra­tion policy hor­rors makes them dif­fi­cult to think about in a coherent way, and it’s tempting just to turn to and forget about the whole débâcle, now that we finally can. Which might be a healthy thing from a per­sonal equa­nimity per­spec­tive, but we should prob­ably be bal­ancing that with an effort to learn from these mistakes.

Hugh (a dif­ferent Hugh) has been com­piling a list of the scan­dals of the Bush years. It’s not going to soothe your spirit, but I find it sat­is­fying as an effort to throw up all the ter­rible things into one place where you can look at them, and have some kind of uni­fied feel for the whole bloody mess. 

Bush Scandal List

It’s inevitably sub­jec­tive. The bullet points range from spe­cific (Harriet Meirs supreme court nom­i­na­tion) to rel­a­tively abstract (Marginalization of the UN). A number of the listed scan­dals strike me as debat­able in con­tent, and some of them are not prin­ci­pally the fault of the exec­u­tive office, but overall the list gen­er­ally seems to get things about right.

There’s a titles-​​only ver­sion here, and you can break it all down by cat­e­gory by clicking on the links on the right. For instance, I have this nag­ging feeling that the sub-​​list of environment-​​specific scan­dals is a little lacking, but that may be because a lot of the deci­sions the Bush admin­is­tra­tion made on envi­ron­mental policy may still appear rel­a­tively incon­se­quen­tial, and we’re only going to find out which ones were espe­cially regret­table over a long painful period of reflection.

2 comments:


simone
7 Feb 2009

Are you employing reason or pure emo­tion. Obama has been pres­i­dent for a very short time an has already sur­passed Bush on the scandal front. Obama has shown the ability to make Bush look like a a beacon of virtue, integrity and intel­li­gence in less than 15 days. If I believed in con­spiracy the­o­ries I would hold that Obama is on the Bush pay­roll to help Jebb Bush get the nod in 2012.

For a brief list to help you see that you are pushing non­sense please review Obama nom­i­nees which have pulled-​​out of con­sid­er­a­tion in less that 15 days of his office.

Then note his desire to ter­rify the American people with threats con­cerning the stim­ulus package.

What about his Afagan and Iraq promises?

How about his ter­rorism pledges?

Maybe we should think about his pledges on lobbyists?

Your rea­soning on pol­i­tics sug­gests you don’t hold it to the same stan­dard you hold to your profession.


Hugh
16 Feb 2009

Both, I think.

That’s a remark­able claim. Normally, I don’t think I would even know how to begin to respond to it, given the shear quan­tity of Bush admin­is­tra­tion cat­a­stro­phes. Do I point to Iraq? Global Warming? Guantanamo? The end­less little detailed pro­ce­dural changes made in the envi­ron­mental, social, and com­merce depart­ments which robbed value from com­mu­ni­ties and passed it over to rich cor­po­rate enti­ties? None of those things indi­vid­u­ally seem to cap­ture the blasted crying shame that was the 8 years of soci­etal regres­sion of the Bush administration.

Luckily, someone made a list.

As for your con­cerns with Obama, I wel­come anyone’s crit­ical analysis of the new pres­i­dent. I dis­agree with all of your points except the “ter­ri­fying American people” thing, and on that one he’s hardly holding a candle to the Orange Alert ready​.gov stan­dard for ambiguous over­hanging fear set by his predecessors.

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