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 debacle, 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.
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.
