Letters to the Editor
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Bush might have been a decent President anyway
It's hard to imagine what sort of President Bush might have been without 9/11. Before than moment Bush was pushing globalism, WTO status for China. To properly assess the likely Bush agenda, one has to decide if the war in Iraq would have gone ahead, with or without that terrible event. Since Clinton provided continuity, after Gulf War I, and there were terrorist attacks outside of 9/11, you have to say, yes we probably would be in Iraq, even if 9/11 never happened.
Secondly Clinton's rather deft handling of the deficit allowed the American mindset to dismiss such things as cyclical matters, esoteric facts for eggheads to figure out, as long as Main Street was getting along.
The expansion of credit, first at the hands of the Federal Reserve, slid easily into the world of private finance, where it managed to escape the Federal Reserve Boards control. Leadership should have seen this coming, but they were free market advocates after all, and biased toward a policy which allowed the market to decide these things. Chide them for printing money, but the government only prints the money to accomodate the credit which is being monetized, and to do otherwise would be counter productive.
Meanwhile the Bush budgetary machine enjoyed the flow of cash, which allowed them to run a way too expensive war, off the books. Money was being passed around like candy, and lot of it ended up in Republican campaign coffers. Life was good. Lately, when the Senate committee asks Bernanke about the state of the economy, his reply should be, well let me call up the President and the Congress, and see how much they are going to spend this year, because over half of GDP is government spending, and that is a conservative estimate. The real issue when rating the Bush Presidency, is a matter of integrity, did he do the things he said he would, remain true to his core values, and his constituents? And if he did wander off the farm, did circumstances warrant it?
In that regard his Presidency reflects a not inconsequential betrayal of American values, and the trust of the American people. 9/11 counts for something, but Bush was already running counter to his stated political beliefs before that. The man is a loose cannon, and always was, and that brings a lot of questions to mind, about the political system in this country.