Eventually most of us will look back and thank Bush for pushing the neoconservative agenda over the cliff.

It will be very painful for awhile but we'll recover from the Bush Mismanagement Years into eventual prosperity.

I remember listening to Bush campaigning for the 2000 presidency, wondering how anyone could vote for this tongue-tied, gramatically challenged, simplistic, religious nut.

The 50% or so that voted for the Idiot will go back to watching daytime TV while the rest of us fix the mess that Bush has left us.

You guys really should cease and desist with the lies about a "surplus". It didn't exist. Look at the the data that matter, the actual total government debt. It's increased ever year since 1957. Even you should be able to understand that if you debt has increased then you have spent more than your income.

The data is here. Pages 133-134

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf

"And G.W. Bush came as close to inheriting a peaceful and prosperous nation as any president in the last 50 years"

I have to disagree with you on that. Clinton in 1993 inherited an economy that had been in recovery for 18 months and had, according to the NYT, Clinton was inheriting an economy that was growing at a fast pace.

As noted above, Bush inherited the Clinton-Gore recession.

And, of course, after Reagan's policies brought down the Soviet Union, Team Clinton's main concern in 1993 was how to spend the so-called "peace dividend."

Seeing it all in one place, in black and white makes me want to jump out a window...

Where is the outrage??

Say what you will, you can't debate the fact that gwb screwed up ONE HELLUVA LOT (in fact, almost everything he touched) REGARDLESS OF ANYTHING CLINTON OR ANYONE ELSE DID OR DIDN'T DO. bush is the PERFECT EXAMPLE of the Peter Principle, i.e, the accumulation of incompetence at the top. Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it "conservatives!" heh

Lets face it ... the Republicans poured strychnine into their own well. If any single person could have done everything wrong in an eight year period George Bush did.

These few examples are a mere tip of the iceberg:

1. - Pandering to the Fundamentalist extreme.

2. - Fictionalizing an excuse for an illegal war.

3. - Demonstrating a reckless disregard for the troops that were so despicably put in harms way.

4. - Knowingly providing veterans services at substandard or non-existent levels.

5. - Funneling billions of dollars in sweetheart deals to political allies in big Pharma , Big Oil, Big Insurance, and War Profiteering.

6. - Secretly disguising his own financial gain.

7. - Deregulating the financial sector, encouraging the pillage of the American People and eventual destruction of the global economy.

8. - Mortgaging America's future by financing a war to the tune of three trillion dollars in loans from Communist China.

9. - Believing the electorate was too stupid to recognize the thousands of lies perpetrated to cover his wrongful acts.

10. - Destroying the United States international standing.

11. - Corrupting the Constitution of the United States.

12. - Giving Special Interest groups and Lobbyists free reign to articulate and write law.

13. - Corrupting the electoral process.

14. - Believing that his contempt for America would not be exposed for its open hostility to Main street, infatuation with greed, loyalty to power for powers sake and utterly indefensible assault on the American peoples will.

Is it mostly Bush’s fault? Is it mostly Clinton’s fault? While I agree that Bush is an idiot, and Clinton is dishonest, since there seems to be plenty of good arguments in support of blame for any political leader we want to pick, let’s step back and consider that perhaps the root cause of the problem isn’t the personality at the top. Perhaps the root cause is the political system itself. It sure seems to me that most politicians now base their “leadership” decisions on a combination of the following three things: (1.) What will most likely garner them reelection or campaign contributions. (2.) What will garner them personal power. (3.) What will garner them personal wealth. These politicians most all abdicate responsibility to constituents in favor of personal benefit. We have allowed this to happen because we allow and encourage professional politicians in support of the mistaken notion that we are best off with a professional in office to represent us. D, or R, or I, or L, it doesn’t matter. We don’t need professional politicians. We need amateur politicians. We need politicians that we all face the near term reality of returning to live and work along side members of their community. I am pretty sure that a system that incorporates a one term limit on every elected office would go a long way in correcting the root cause problem.

"Fictionalizing an excuse for an illegal war."

Again:

"The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent."

- Hillary Clinton, September 24, 2003

"The consensus was the same, from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. It was the same intelligence belief that our allies and friends around the world shared." - Hillary Clinton, April 21, 2004

"Because what happened was the information that we got on the intelligence committee was, was relatively consistent with what I was getting from former Clinton administration officials." - John Ed-wards, February 4, 2007

My loathing for you and your torturing-for-Jesus ilk precludes a response other than this:

I assume you're lying about having served. I assume you're lying about being blocked from future service. I assume you've lied so long and so deeply that you no longer have any sense of truth or semblance of decency.

OK Dick,

Give us the left wing revisionist version then.

History shows otherwise:

The collapse of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics radically changed the world's economic and political environment. No other conflict of interest dominated the post World War Two world like the cold war did. One man is credited with ending the cold war, Mikhail Gorbachev. This however was not the biggest event Gorbachev was responsible for. The end of the cold war was just a by-product of the other major event he was involved with. That is the fall of communism in the USSR and the collapse of the USSR itself.

Gorbachev a communist reformer was appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985. His appointment followed the death of three previous Soviet leaders in three years. Leonid Brezhnev was first to go followed by Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko. Not being able to afford another short term leader the old guard appointed the youthful 56 year old Mikhial Gorbachev as General Secretary.

From the outside it seemed as if this great superpower self destructed in only three months. The USSR's demise is of course more complicated than this. The break up of the USSR can be traced back to Gorbachevs appointment and his early reforms. Gorbachev introduced a wide ranging program of reform. His major reforms were glasnost, perestroika and democratisation. These reforms allowed the problems of the USSR to be uncovered and become public knowledge.