It cannot be said often enough that George W Bush did to this country what he did to every business he ever touched. If I ever hear a conservative say again "We need a CEO president" I will be a candidate for the death penalty. He truly is a vile, despicable, SMALL man who should be shunned forever.

"What a stupid, despicable man"

AMEN!

He is a stupid, despicable man. And delusional. There is not enough lipstick in Sarah Palin's kit to help this tragedy.

I hope he gets to break rocks real soon.

Don't forget cowardly.

We need to build a new Spandau for him, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld.

The difference between Reagan and Bush II is that Reagan, before the alzheimer's, was a normal, rational human being who largely surrounded himself with other normal, rational human beings. They may have had bad ideas and they may have had bad values, but aside from a few nutters, they were basically reasonable in the technical sense of the word.

Bush II, the folks around him and the movement that supports him are not, on a very basic level, rational human beings. I mean, for pity's sake, President Bush has just been handed yet another chance to try and repair his legacy by the way he handles the economic crisis and look how he's acting. Forget about helping anyone else, he can't even figure out how to help himself!

MIke

Herbert Hoover's legacy was 'Hoovervilles' -- squatter camps for the homeless. What will our 43rd president's legacy be?

Homeless shelters can be called 'Hotel Bush'. Soup kitchens call be called 'McDubya's'. Abandoned factories can be called 'Crawford Ranches'.

But let's not stop at Bush's economic legacy. Elbridge Gerry is remembered through the term 'gerrymander'. Henceforth, we can call an illegal wiretap 'a Bush' or 'doing a 43'.

And let's not forget the rest of the administration. Torture can now be called 'a Cheney'. And voter 'caging' can be called 'a Rove'.

Two words:

Arrogant Incompetance. That really does sum it all up.

Heh, Lame F**k!

Well, as for the new President on the way: it seems that "the markets" are now getting the idea that he and his team are capable, reasonably centrist folks - so, they're going up again. Hmmm, so therefore: we can blame the rightwing media like Rush, Hannity, Beck, Coulter, Faux/WSJ etc. for the big declines in the markets in the bad stretch earlier, because they pumped up the idea of how horrible and leftist Obama would be, and spooked investors! Let's spread that blame around ...

This, I think, sums up the fundamental issue between business and government, and why Bush failed so spectacularly. A business leader's first goal is to maximize profit and productivity for the organization; one key aspect of this is to externalize as many costs as possible (e.g., cost of cleaning up pollution) while internalizing the profits (ideally, by using Other People's Money).

The heart of effective government, on the other hand, is to manage society as a whole. By definition, there ARE no costs that can be externalized. And the "bottom line" of government can't just be measured on a spreadsheet.

Of course, I always remember what someone wrote about an MBA: "If Edison had an MBA, he would have come up with the world's biggest candle."

Bush doesn't get this. Obama does.

SteveT: "Cheney you" has already been appropriated to saying "fuck you", so torture needs a different handle.

Neil B said:
SteveT: "Cheney you" has already been appropriated to saying "fuck you", so torture needs a different handle.

I dashed my comment off in a hurry. I welcome other suggestions. In fact, I think it would be really cool if the whole discussion went viral.

I couldn't come up with a snappy handle for toilet paper that refers to the Constitution and Bush or Gonzo. Anyone have any ideas?

Good point, artsmith. But remember, Bush also drove every business he ran into the ground, too. And the baseball team doesn't count, because the other owners were smart enough to not let him anywhere near the gears and levers.

Artsmith:
I am not sure I get what you are saying. Bush failed first as a businessman. (Well, he failed even earlier as a jet pilot, but that's kind of
a gimme.) So when you say
'why Bush failed so spectacularly', I assume you are
referring to his government failings. But he
apparently did not understand business either,
so saying he did not understand the difference between government and business implies he understood something about business.

My understanding is the only thing he understood about business was that after you fail, either your father or his friends will bail you out.

Bush took a shot at managing a country. It didn't work out. To him America is just another second-division baseball team. Time to dump it and move on to something else. I wonder what he has in mind? Whatever it is, sell it short. Pappy knew from the beginning that this kid had "Loser" written all over him.

But Bush, with very few exceptions, could ever own up to his errors.

Because they are not errors. The goal of this administration was to ruin the machinery of government. They have done so. The immense damage you see is proof of success, no failure.

catclub, greg: yes, good points. I was speaking more generically about the role of a business versus a government leader. But your (and other) points about The Decider being a blazing incompetent in every endeavor he's tried are also accurate. A mutation on the Peter Principle: not only did he rise to his level of incompetence very early on in life, but he was able to depend on others to bail his sorry ass out each time; therefore, he was able to rise to ever higher levels of incompetence, until he's now at the top of the pyramid, with no one to bail out/cover up for his incompetence. And the collective "we" (those who didn't vote for him, as well as those who did) are stuck cleaning up after him once again.

Godwin's Law Alert:

Several psychoanalysts have posited that Hitler was actually motivated by a desire to destroy Germany, and that this accounted for his many irrational decisions that snatched defeat from certain victories: halting the army before Dunkerque; Operation Barbarossa; leaving his army stranded in Russia.

How long before the books begin appearing dealing with George W Bush's latent desire to destroy the USA? Seriously - the man has been a Disaster Attractor from Day 1, and has done what he could to exacerbate the problems in any way he could.

Jokeline had him down as good on immigration. That's it - after eight years. Imagine if he'd been let lose on Social Security.

GEORGE WALKER BUSH WAS NEVER A CONSERVATIVE. HAS NEVER BEEN A CONSERVATIVE.

HE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOCIOPATH, PERHAPS EVEN A PSYCHOPATH.

and everyone who grew up with him in midland, who went to school with him, who were not similarly mentally defective, knew that.

and this tells you more than you want to know about the amerikan electorate...there is still a large segment of the amerikan voting population that are similarly mentally defective.

instead of flouride, we need to be adding lithium to the water supply.

Joe Klein from Time weighs in with The Lamest Duck

Sorry, Mike, but no, Reagan's people were not that great. James Watt, Ed Meese, Bill Bennett come immediately to mind as people that the nation would have been better off without. Al Haig was marginal, and sometimes embarrassing. Drew Lewis was fine, if by fine you mean that you hate Amtrak and air traffic controllers. Jeanne Kirkpatrick's cosying up to dictators was terrible: Argentina's Galtieri, Nicaraguan death squads, juntas in Chile (Pinochet), Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Remember the good-old-buddies picture of Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld? - Kirkpatrick sent him. Remember Iran-Contra, with Ollie North & Admiral Pointdexter (more fine Reagan folk)? - Kirkpatrick authorized the first $19 million that went to the Contras. Cap Weinberger never met a weapons system proposal he didn't want to spend money on. Ray Donovan was a deep, deep embarrassment, albeit for corruption rather than flamboyant nuttery of the Watt category, although Sam Pierce at HUD was worse (check out Winn, Demery, and Gore Dean). Rita Lavelle's politicization of the EPA and its superfund now seems quaint by Bush standards, but at the time it was execrable. I don't recall who advised it, but some of Reagan's not-so-fine advisors promoted the decisions about deregulation that precipitated the the by-pre-Bush-standards-obscenely-expensive savings & loan debacle. Face it, crappy government has become a proud Republican tradition.

Neil B said:
SteveT: "Cheney you" has already been appropriated to saying "fuck you", so torture needs a different handle.

I dashed my comment off in a hurry. I welcome other suggestions. -- SteveT, @16:47

Don't know about the noun, but, for the verb: "to Yooyou"

To an extent he has been successful having attained peak competence with being incompetent.

It's like he thinks he's still running the Texas Rangers...

That's called "Moral Clarity."

I guess this is what happens when you hire a 'C' student in a job that demands an 'A' student.

Is this really the guy you wanna have a beer with?

Haven't you guys learned, the phrase, "Don't mess with Texas," mean something? Wow, we have had so many of this Tex con artists to last a lifetime! They may talk with a swag, wear their cowboy boots with pride, but one thing they are good at is taking everyone for a ride.

Just figure, we almost got Palin. And wouldn't you know, she didn't turn over her Medical Records as promised. Why?

I didn't vote for 'W' so I can say whatever I want on this matter. And for sure, there's no way I could every vote for someone like Palin. I did vote in this election though.

As far as boy George being a lame duck, he knows the people will let him do it. ***this is just like relationships, your partner is going to do whatever you let them get away with.

So, he knows he can sit and do nothing and still live like a king funded by the taxpayers, sit and watch with a smirk, and there will be no protests to make him step down. Honestly, I guess if I had a job and can just show up and not do anything because I knew my days were numbered, I'd probably do it too.

On the flip side, I learned alot from boy George and the right wing these past 8 years. I learned that maybe religion is just something to control people? I went back and reread "Plato's Republic," and, together with the bible, these Greek philosphers are warning people about each other. I am now Agnostic!!!!

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Steve Benen, like many other analysts and pundits both "liberal" and "conservative", is mistaken to believe that Bush and Cheney are committed to "conservative ideas" or ideology.

Bush and Cheney are crooks, plain and simple.

Their so-called "neo-conservative ideology" is bullshit. It is a scam. It is a fake, phony pseudo-ideology that they concocted to bamboozle and distract the gullible (on both left and right) while they loot the US Treasury and misuse the US military as a private mercenary army, all for corrupt purposes of financial gain for themselves and their cronies and financial backers.

The reason that no one on the right or the left can make any sense of Cheney-Bush's "ideology" -- what is it? what are its principles? are they committed to it? how can they justify this or that action that seems inconsistent with "conservative" principles? -- is because it doesn't exist except as a barrage of bullshit that appears incoherent because it is incoherent -- because its whole purpose is to be incoherent and confusing, to distract people and keep them scratching their heads while the Cheney-Bush gang cracks the safe, grabs the loot, and makes their getaway with the wealth of a nation.

Cheney and Bush are gangsters and thieves masquerading as "neo-conservative" ideologues. They have no more "ideology" than does a burglar or mugger.

But Bush, with very few exceptions, could never own up to his errors.

Of course!

He never has had to before why start now? Then there is the fact that assuming he believes he made errors, an admittance of said errors would be prevented by his ego which needs to believe he is strong and manly (the strong and manly aren't weak and admitting errors is weak - to him).

Frankly, it is all a bit too psychological for me to think to hard about it. I can't wait till he goes back to clearing brush in Texas and I can stop thinking about this 8 year long nightmare.