Bush's Legacy aka "Quickly to the Revisionism-mobile!"

[Sea Skimmer]

Presumably Peak Fossil Fuels will really begin to make itself felt, and some future President might choose to ignore the lesson of Bush and engage in an even more spectacular clusterfuck in the ME as a result.

I don’t buy the peak oil/water/food doomsday scenarios, but I do strongly believe shortages of those resources will lead to great instability in the world, the edges of which we’ve already seen. Indeed, we’ve been seeing the edges for a very long time on the matter of war over farmland; just ask Hitler was lebensraum meant. As the US will remain the worlds most powerful nation indefinitely, we will become involved in this, even if through astounding means we actually implement a new and consistent energy policy and aren't caught up in the resource shortages too badly ourselves. Now toss in all the ethnic and religious problems the world already has, which are being multiplied by huge expansions of population, and well, not a good recipe.

The issue if new military clusterfucks is very real in its own right. Korea is now best known simply as The Forgotten War despite killing millions, and it was incredibly unpopular from the very onset with the American public… Yet, this did nothing to stop us from sending an even larger army to Vietnam just fourteen years later. Then the short victorious Gulf War 1 in 1991 blinded people to Vietnam and paved the way for a whole new round of military adventurism. Now that Iraq hasn’t turned out to be the utter disaster predicted by so many, and Afghanistan is likely to just drag on until fully forgotten (kind of like Iraq already has, at least so far as media coverage is concerned) I’m not seeing a huge barrier to future adventures. Sure, not under Obama, not for ten, twenty years, but after that? It’s an unknown world, but it will be packed with more people, nuclear weapons and problems then ever before.

I'm not saying this will add up to people praising Bush, just more that he’ll be glossed over as historians are keen to skip from the end of the cold war to the beginning of the era of no superpowers. Historians also like to come up with new explanations for things, after all, they would have much less of a job otherwise, so that’s another shot in favor of Bush. Heck, the more successful Obama is the less is likely to be written of Bush.

[thejester]

Also appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Reading these replies though, I do wonder about this line:

The first is that history, by looking at the key facts rather than being distracted by the loud ambient noise of the 24-hour news cycle, will probably hand down a far more positive judgment on Bush's presidency than the immediate, knee-jerk loathing of the American and European elites.

Granted the guy's hardly a neutral observer, but I do wonder to what extent he's right (or will be right), particularly on this point.

It's the nature of historical study that interpretations of men and events will go through cycles. Take someone like Douglas Haig. Up until the 60s he was generally fondly remembered, and it was only in the 60s that the historical opinion began to emerge that 'holy shit, this guy was bad'. Recently however the likes of Gary Sheffield have emerged and argued the reverse, that Haig was a competent commander who was hamstrung by the technology of the time and was in the end succesful. Nixon is another who has been rehabilitated (partly as a result of his own efforts) so there is now a much greater emphasis n his foreign policy success rather than his criminal failings.

Bush will inevitably go through the same cycle, accentuated by how divisive he was as a President.

[Samuel]

Indeed, we’ve been seeing the edges for a very long time on the matter of war over farmland; just ask Hitler was lebensraum meant.

That isn't really accurate. Germany was an industrialized country that couldn't support it self just by agriculture (which is why blockading was so effective)- their strength was not agriculture. Hitler just wanted it as part of the myth of the noble farmer.

Now toss in all the ethnic and religious problems the world already has, which are being multiplied by huge expansions of population, and well, not a good recipe.

I believe that the rate of growth is slowing down. The bigger problem is that resource usage for the newly emergent middle class in the third world.

Historians also like to come up with new explanations for things, after all, they would have much less of a job otherwise, so that’s another shot in favor of Bush. Heck, the more successful Obama is the less is likely to be written of Bush.

The ultimate defeat, to only be known as a trivia question.

[Illuminatus Primus]

In the long run I think history won’t write that badly about Bush, but only because much worse stuff is going to happen in the next fifty years.

Like what?

Presumably Peak Fossil Fuels will really begin to make itself felt, and some future President might choose to ignore the lesson of Bush and engage in an even more spectacular clusterfuck in the ME as a result. New Orleans might sink into the Gulf of Mexico, and climate change will diminish the output from the nation's breadbasket, not to mention screw over most people living in the Sun Belt. At some point, the California megacities might experience the long-expected Big One. The deeply religious conservatives could outbreed the secularists, as some have predicted, and the historians of the following generations will decree the Bush Administration to be the best thing to have happened to humanity short of the Second Coming of Jesus.

I'm asking him. Not you.

[Mayabird]

Ah, so returning to the old neocon doctrine of "We're the big guys so we can make history what we want." Before it was, "Think of what history will say about us! We should do all this stuff, just like people did in the past!" and now it's "Think of what history will say about us! We'll say we did this stuff, just like people did in the past!" The future will tell how badly or disturbingly well they understood history and its practices.

[CmdrWilkens]

I'm not saying this will add up to people praising Bush, just more that he’ll be glossed over as historians are keen to skip from the end of the cold war to the beginning of the era of no superpowers. Historians also like to come up with new explanations for things, after all, they would have much less of a job otherwise, so that’s another shot in favor of Bush. Heck, the more successful Obama is the less is likely to be written of Bush.

In this vein one could easily see the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict as being this generation's Mexican War. Except for the relative accomplishments of each conflict the point is that very few folks who take a quick review of US History will sutmble upon the Mexican War as it is taught as simply part of the interregnum between the Jacksonians and the Compromise of 1850. If we have a major crisis in the future or the focus continues to be on the issue of whether the US will continue to hold on to its position as "the only remaining superpower" then Iraq and Afghanistan as well as everything else in the Bush presidency simply becomes the life and times of Polk part deux; researched by historians and ignored by the populace as a whole.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

I suspect that Bush will not be remembered and hated by history, on the whole of it. Most of the presidents we consider horrible today - Harding, Hoover, Grant - were simply very ineffectual people who did not get a lot done while in office. Bush, on the other hand, has. Say what you will, but he's had a damn good batting average for reform (for the worse) and fulfilling his campaign promises (except for that whole Bin Laden thing). Further, he's likely to be remembered for two successful wars to bring democracy about and for having successfully pursued a peaceful solution with nations like Libya. Add to this that people ten years from now will forget about the response to Katrina and 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in the US' (I mean, who really brings up that a Japanese Attack was seen as a near-certainty by Roosevelt prior to Pearl Harbor?) and just remember that Bush had to deal with a bunch of disasters.

All in all, I suspect he'll be a very divisive figure, largely disliked (since, you know, he was gawdawful like Wilson), but views on him will soften in the coming decades, I suspect. More of a Woodrow Wilson than a Johnson or Reagan.

[weemadando]

Janet Albrechtsen's column today, The Australian continues to peddle bullshit. But at least they've been nice enough to label it as Opinion again. And put in a counterpoint article.

[thejester]

Albrechtsen complaining about slipping media standards is embarrassingly hypocritical. How she can continue to put her opinions forward in public, let alone be employed, after the Media Watch debacle is beyond me. If nothing else you could accuse her of being unfaillingly unoriginal - you could replace 'Obama' with 'Vietnam' and the substance of the column wouldn't change much. This comment essentially said it all:

Squawk leftists...squawk liberal…

Janet I share your hatred of the Toastmaster. Went once and there was not a slice of toast to be had, even though I’d brought my own marmalade. Just a room full of slick speakers using the language properly. I didn’t hear the word ‘misunderestimate’ once. How dare they? I suspect they were inner city elites. There was latte on their breath and I saw a novel sticking out from a bag. These people just aren’t plain spoken. Why can’t they understand that the world must be run by honest-to-God (note the capital G), salt-of-the-earth conservatives (in both the Australian and American sense) like you and me who live in the outer suburbs, drive British-made Range Rovers. That’s why I refuse to teach my children pronouns. I’m hoping my eldest might be President one day. I’m sure she’ll have your vote.

[weemadando]

Albrechtsen complaining about slipping media standards is embarrassingly hypocritical. How she can continue to put her opinions forward in public, let alone be employed, after the Media Watch debacle is beyond me. If nothing else you could accuse her of being unfaillingly unoriginal - you could replace 'Obama' with 'Vietnam' and the substance of the column wouldn't change much. This comment essentially said it all:

Squawk leftists...squawk liberal…

Janet I share your hatred of the Toastmaster. Went once and there was not a slice of toast to be had, even though I’d brought my own marmalade. Just a room full of slick speakers using the language properly. I didn’t hear the word ‘misunderestimate’ once. How dare they? I suspect they were inner city elites. There was latte on their breath and I saw a novel sticking out from a bag. These people just aren’t plain spoken. Why can’t they understand that the world must be run by honest-to-God (note the capital G), salt-of-the-earth conservatives (in both the Australian and American sense) like you and me who live in the outer suburbs, drive British-made Range Rovers. That’s why I refuse to teach my children pronouns. I’m hoping my eldest might be President one day. I’m sure she’ll have your vote.

I read that response at work and just about had a ROFL moment.

[Darth Wong]

I suspect that Bush will not be remembered and hated by history, on the whole of it. Most of the presidents we consider horrible today - Harding, Hoover, Grant - were simply very ineffectual people who did not get a lot done while in office. Bush, on the other hand, has. Say what you will, but he's had a damn good batting average for reform (for the worse) and fulfilling his campaign promises (except for that whole Bin Laden thing). Further, he's likely to be remembered for two successful wars to bring democracy about and for having successfully pursued a peaceful solution with nations like Libya. Add to this that people ten years from now will forget about the response to Katrina and 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in the US' (I mean, who really brings up that a Japanese Attack was seen as a near-certainty by Roosevelt prior to Pearl Harbor?) and just remember that Bush had to deal with a bunch of disasters.

All in all, I suspect he'll be a very divisive figure, largely disliked (since, you know, he was gawdawful like Wilson), but views on him will soften in the coming decades, I suspect. More of a Woodrow Wilson than a Johnson or Reagan.

I personally think he'll be most remembered for 4 things:

1) Being a devotee of the disastrous unregulated free-market economic policy that began with Ronald Reagan and which just coincidentally happened to benefit his own wealthy class.

2) Attempting to greatly expand America's role as "GloboCop".

3) Attempting to greatly expand the powers of the President.

4) Almost single-handedly degrading America's perceived ideals and moral standards to the point that it became perfectly acceptable to advocate torture and imprisonment without due process in public.

In the end, I think he'll be summarized into a single sentence, like most presidents, and that sentence will involve the word "hubris". People will look at his career and summarize it as an arrogant attempt to remake the entire world to his personal liking, and brush aside any economic reasoning, moral principles, or constitutional law which got in his way.

Unless, of course, his fan club succeeds in completely whitewashing the history books and getting most of academia to go along with them, the way the Christians managed to write their "Hitler was an anti-Christian pagan" bullshit into common belief. But I don't consider that too likely, considering the fact that the Christian propaganda campaign was partially driven by an intense desire on the part of almost all western society to absolve their belief system of association with Hitler, while Bush has, if anything, worked hard to alienate academia and the scholars who will be writing his epitaph.