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.