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Bush has certainly been incompetent and immoral, and is probably a war criminal, but let's give credit where credit is due. Being a target of terrorist attacks is a consequence of American imperialism, which in its present form goes back to the 1940s. Clinton's part in the program included several military attacks on several countries, including Yugoslavia, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, which was blockaded as well as bombed, the program supposedly resulted in 500,000 deaths, most of them children, of which Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, famously said, "We think it is worth it." The Clinton administration also pursued the expansion of NATO, which adversely affected the political development of post-Communist Russia and will almost certainly be a source of important trouble in the future. The American habit of attacking and threatening foreign countries and peoples ensured that, sooner or later, there would be hostile responses. Obama has explicitly stated that he plans more of the same in the future, in spite of having been elected as a sort of peace candidate, so we can expect more of the same sort of results we have observed.
The present financial and economic crisis was made inevitable by a headlong expansion of debt and credit, going back at least to the 1980s, in part to fund imperial adventures without having to tax the people, who, unlike their ruling class, are ambivalent about war and imperialism and might have been a source of political trouble. Again, we see a uniformity of policy all the way through, and more of the same is promised by Obama, who has made one of the architects of the present debacle, Larry Summers, a top financial advisor.
Bush increased domestic repression more radically than his predecessors, but most of the time all Clinton had to work with for this purpose was the Drug War. Obama, by voting for FISA last spring, showed that he plans to continue this part of the program.
In short, in these areas of fundamental policy (and others as well), while Bush was unusually incompetent and mendacious, he hewed to the line in general. It seems like further mendacity to complain about the results of these policies as if they had been his invention.
