Monday, January 19, 2009

Political Comment: Good Riddance!

I saw a headline this morning saying that George W. Bush has already moved out of the White House. All I can say is good riddance. Whether he ends up being judged the worst president ever ultimately doesn't matter; it ought to be shameful enough that he's in the running. I think there are a lot of reasons to be grateful to be finally rid of this bozo, but here are the main ones:

For corrupting conservatism, collaborating in reducing an honest if debatable intellectual perspective to little more than self-serving dogma and brain-numbing cant.

For valuing personal loyalty over accountability to the American people, and as a consequence elevating the interests of his party over those of the country.

For lowering the bar so dramatically that the likes of Sarah Palin are taken seriously as presidential contenders even as they mirror his own appalling lack of curiosity or engagement with the world and its multiplicity of ideas.

For denigrating science in particular and academia in general, so that issues of health, safety, and security became defined strictly in terms of their money-making potential for the few who knew how to manipulate the system.

For equating religious faith with what’s right, but only when it served the self-interest of his supporters rather than the general good of the nation.

For creating an administration so larded with hacks, sycophants, and conscience-less prigs that any effort at investigation of wrongdoing in their departments resulted in blatant whitewashing and exoneration of responsibility for the most egregious of crimes.

And more than anything else, for the poorly concealed glee he often displayed when reporting the most dreadful violence against fellow human beings, to much of which he was an accomplice.

George W. Bush deserves to go down in history as a bad president, and one can only hope that the American people will learn some valuable lessons as a result of his failure.

4 comments:

Lil' Sis said...

Dr John,
Well I guess you are entitled to your opinion but do you really need to debase yourself with the ugly name calling? I am not necessarily saying your thoughts on how GW ran the country are wrong (you make many fine and accurate points) but the meanness you seem to display makes me very sad =( I get the point you are happy he and his cabinet are gone, can't you just leave it at that?
Lil' Sis

Anonymous said...

Oh My, John, what a rant...I would like to know what valuable lesson you, as an American citizen, have learned from Georgie's failures.
Mom

Anonymous said...

John,
I agree with you completely
T

John Hajduk said...

I don't see where I've engaged in any name-calling. The labels I used describe behavior which is quite prevalent in the history of this administration (if I crossed the line in that regard, it may be in accusing some of being conscience-less-- in retrospect I don't know that for a fact). I think that throughout his time in office Bush showed great disrespect (if not contempt) for the Constitution, and that if we don't call him on that, then we allow ever greater abuses to occur until the core principles of this country no longer have any practical meaning. So this is me, for what it's worth, calling him on it. I think the lesson to learn from Bush's failures is that in turning our backs on how the the Constitution protects us (however difficult it sometimes may be to live up to all it demands, especially for those in government) pretty much insures that we lose those protections, and with them everything that made this country great in the first place.
Dr. John