In my last post I pointed out how the Bush administration took what had been a successful program of sex education that had reduced the incidence of teen pregnancies and STD's and replaced it with abstinence-only education which has in turn resulted in the first actual increase in teen pregnancies in years.
Now we find out in regard to the CIA interrogation tapes which were destroyed that this happened directly contrary to the direct orders of White House Deputy counsel Harriet Miers. So in other words the CIA is now (and in 2005 was) running its own show, ignoring direct orders from White House officials.
We've also seen such extreme incompetence and ineptitude as our stumbling into the Iraq war without any planning for what to do after the fall of Baghdad, the botched response (and continuing failure to fully respond) to Katrina, and turning a record surplus into an enormous deficit. Nothing has been done about heatlhcare for eight years except for the prescription drug giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies, with the effect that we now have the most expensive health care system in the world and it still isn't working. The housing crisis is likely to drag down the economy for at least the foreseeable future.
Our reputation internationally is as bad as its ever been, the myth of American military invincibility has been thrown to the wind, and with our army being stuck in the quicksand of Iraq, North Korea has been free to develop and build nuclear weapons and even if you believe the CIA report last week (which I am personally very skeptical of) there is no question that the real winners of the Iraq war have been the Iranians, who have gone from at best an annoying irritant in the middle east to a regional power that threatens to dominate the region.
We've seen how after crime went way down nationally during the 1990's that it is now going back up again, and how after a decade in which SAT scores and the performance of American students against international competition was improving, it is now declining again. The dollar has declined from $.66 to a euro to over $1.20 for one euro. Prices for gasoline have more than doubled, and by next summer may hit $4.00 per gallon, which will represent a tripling of the price in just seven years.
In short, pretty much everything that the Bush administration has touched, has turned to garbage.
Whatever else will be written about this adminstration, it is clear that it will be considered the most incompetent Presidency since at least Jimmy Carter's.
3 comments:
Why was the Deputy White House Counsel giving the CIA orders? That seems a bit far down from the top for someone to be ordering the CIA around.
Also, could Dick Cheney (or Stephen Hadley, or someone else higher up in the White House / national security pecking order have issued contrary orders? It wouldn't surprise me at all if Cheney did something like that.
Bush is totally incompetent and lacking in any skills other than rape of an economy, stripping of freedom and starting wars to further his agenda of world dominance.
Good point Indy.
They may well have been destroyed on direct orders from someone higher up in the administration.
The difference between the Bush White House and the Carter White House is that while there may have been some ineptitude in the Carter White House, at least they tried to follow the law, and considered themselves bound by it. In the Bush White House you have incompetence combined with an 'ends-justifies-the-means' mentality in which they consider the law to be merely a minor inconvenience to doing whatever they want to anyway.
And THAT is a lethal combination.
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