Dubya's greatest gift

A couple of years ago a reader sent me a marvellous little gadget that counted down to the end of the Bush administration.

A couple of years ago a reader sent me a marvellous little gadget that counted down to the end of the Bush administration.

 In days, hours, minutes and hundredths of a second. I used to read out the figures on my wireless program – though for the past year or so the dancing digits seemed to be slowing to a glacial pace. As though the great day would never come.

But despite Bush’s denial of climate change, glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate and, suddenly, the end – his end – was nigh. Whereupon the figures became faint and, with the premature death of the battery, faded to black. When the blackness should have shrouded him! The bloke who gave us an entire Dark Age in just eight years – the eight endless years of his obscene incumbency.

To make matters worse I missed out on the inauguration of Barack Obama, something I’d yearned for for so long. His swearing-in – and the banishment of Bush, the greatest buffoon in modern political history – occurred while I was 10,000m over the Middle East. Please forgive this belated response to a great event, but until I read these words I won’t believe it’s finally happened.

My distinguished colleague Frank Devine mourns Bush’s passing. Having been devoted to GWB and all his causes, Frank spoke for fellow pundits – at least a dozen disciples without a single Doubting Thomas – when he insisted that history will judge Bush a great president. That explains all the winged pigs I saw out the plane window.

The judgment of history? I’d prefer the judgment of a War Crimes Tribunal for the lot of them – Bush, Cheney and the repugnant Rumsfeld. Yet I’m with Frank on one issue. Bush did achieve something truly and wholly remarkable. While shredding the US Constitution, while ignoring the lessons of his friends at Enron and allowing the US economy to drag the world towards Depression, while battering the environment with infinitely greater power than Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, and by the monstrous failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, GWB achieved the impossible. He got an African-American – and a comparative radical – elected president.

Thus we are in Bush’s debt. Barack couldn’t have happened without him. He couldn’t have been a contender, let alone a victor. Bush’s appalling record on everything, his total failure on every front from Baghdad to Wall Street, put the wind beneath Barack’s wings. Without the thundering blunderings of Bush a black presidency would have remained a dream for another decade.

So many lost or losing battles. Bush’s war on terror added immensely to the ranks of Islamist fascism. The man who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas has sent thousands of his fellow Americans to their deaths in Iraq, along with an unknown (and carefully suppressed) number of Iraqi civilians, in his war on Saddam. His war in Afghanistan handed back power to the warlords and vastly increased the production of heroin. His war on science – from stem cell research to evolution – retards US research and education. His war on the specific science of climate change has added greatly to the scale and urgency of the crisis. His war on constitutional freedoms and his war on the notion of an independent judiciary will take years to repair. His war on truth – both his administration’s manipulation of military intelligence and his fictions on Saddam’s armory and involvement in 9/11 – set new benchmarks in hardcore political porn. His war on the UN, his preference for “pre-emptive war” over diplomacy, his war on the US’s global reputation, are all without precedent. Then there’s the small matter of torture.

The judgment of history? Frank Devine cites the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. But even at the time of his downfall people on my side of politics acknowledged Nixon’s erratic brilliance, his doomed mixture of political courage and self-destructiveness. We knew that some sort of case could be made for Nixon in some areas of domestic and foreign policy. But Bush? Even his fellow Republicans dumped him early in the election process. They knew that his failings were fatal. As, finally, did most Americans.

Now young Barack has the impossible task of cleaning up the mess and the world is with him. And history’s judgment on his predecessor is clear. Guilty.

George Bush Sr began his term in office with the fall of the Wall and the collapse of communism. His son ended his term with the fall of Wall Street and the collapse of capitalism. That’s the bad news. The good news is that George Jr gave us Barack.