Has President Bush Accomplished Anything?

Pres. Bush's administration will go down in history as the worst. That must is assured. The tendency is to point to Iraq and leave the rest well enough alone. In fact, though Iraq is certainly the worst mistake of this mistake-prone administration, it's far from being the only one. In looking over Pres. Bush's tenure as the country's head of state, a pattern begins to emerge that explains a good deal. The pattern is three-fold:

1) Appointed unqualified people to positions of power.

2) Create an ill-conceived plan to attack a problem.

3) Resist tailoring that plan following unexpected consequences so as to create a strategy for resolution.

The most obvious example, of course, is Iraq. Bush's first mistake was appointing Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Putting Rumsfeld in charge of a war was like putting your child in charge of your finances. You may love the kid to death, but come on! Then the White House created a plan for invading Iraq that refused to take into consideration what would happen after the initial mission was accomplished. Since the initial plan failed to consider anything beyond getting rid of Saddam Hussein, it came as little surprise that the Rumsfeld failed in his attempts to come up with an exit strategy.

The patterns repeats itself endlessly. Take energy and the environment. First Pres. Bush appoints an oil industry crony to confront the issue of global warming and environmental impact. Not only was this guy completely unqualified to run this nation's energy program, but he edited documents to remove the evidence that his policies were just plain wrong. Then Pres. Bush-after coming to the stunning conclusion this century that America is addicted to oil-drafts an energy plan that contains absolutely no plans to get that monkey off America's back. When confronted with mountains of evidence that his plan will have no sustained effect on reducing America's dependence on fossil fuels and will contribute to global warming, Bush's response was merely to repeat himself and offer no new ideas.