Baby Bush: The Worst President in History?

By Doug Casey of The Casey Report

I recognize that I’ve antagonized many subscribers over the years with “Bush Bashing.” In
January, just after OBAMA!’s election, I said I wouldn’t mention Bush again, his departure
having made him irrelevant. I only feel bad that he and his minions will apparently get away
scot-free with their crimes; better they had all been brought up before a tribunal and tried for
crimes against humanity in general and the U.S. Constitution in particular. But that is objectively
true of almost all presidents since at least Lincoln.

Most of our subscribers to The Casey Report appear to be libertarians or classical liberals – i.e.,
people who believe in a maximum of both social and economic freedom for the individual. The
next largest group are “conservatives.” It’s a bit harder to define a conservative. Is it someone
who atavistically just wants to conserve the existing order of things (either now, or perhaps as
they perceived them 50, or 100, or 200, or however many years ago)? Or is a conservative
someone who believes in limiting social freedoms (generally that means suppressing things like
sex, drugs, outré clothing and customs, and bad-mouthing the government) while claiming to
support economic freedoms (although with considerable caveats and exceptions)? It’s unclear to
me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on.

Which leads me to the question: Why do conservatives seem to have this warm and fuzzy feeling
for George W. Bush? I can only speculate it’s because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and
traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem
sincere. Bush’s tendency to fumble words and concepts contrasted to Clinton’s eloquence, which
made him look “slick.”

I’m forced to the conclusion that what “conservatives” like about Bush is his style, such as it
was. Because the only good thing I can recall that Bush ever did was to shepherd through some
tax cuts. But even these were targeted and piecemeal, tossing bones to favored interests, rather
than any principled abolition of any levies or a wholesale cut in rates.

Is it possible that Bush was actually the worst president ever? I’d say he’s a strong contender. He
started out with a gigantic lie -- that he would cut the size of government, reduce taxes, and stay
out of foreign wars -- and things got much worse from there. Let’s look at just some of the
highpoints in the catalog of disasters the Bush regime created.

• No Child Left Behind. Forget about abolishing the Department of Education. Bush made
the federal government a much more intrusive and costly part of local schools.

• Project Safe Neighborhoods. A draconian law that further guts the 2nd Amendment, like
20,000 other unconstitutional gun laws before it.

• Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. This the largest expansion of the welfare state
since LBJ and will cost the already bankrupt Medicare system trillions more.
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Possibly the most expensive and restrictive change to the securities
laws since the ‘30s. A major reason why companies will either stay private or go public
outside the U.S.

• Katrina. A total disaster of bureaucratic mismanagement, featuring martial law.

• Ownership Society. The immediate root of the current financial crisis lies in Bush’s
encouragement of easy credit to everybody and inflating the housing market.

• Nationalizations and Bailouts. In response to the crisis he created, he nationalized

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and passed by far the largest bailouts in U.S. history (until
OBAMA!).

• Free-Speech Zones. Originally a device for keeping war protesters away when Bush
appeared on camera, they’re now used to herd.

• The Patriot Act. This 132-page bill, presented for passage only 45 days after 9/11 (how
is it possible to write something of that size and complexity in only 45 days?) basically
allows the government to do whatever it wishes with its subjects. Warrantless searches.
All kinds of communications monitoring. Greatly expanded asset forfeiture provisions.

• The War on Terror. The scope of the War on Drugs (which Bush also expanded) is
exceeded only by the war on nobody in particular but on a tactic. It’s become a cause of
mass hysteria and an excuse for the government doing anything.

• Invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush started two completely pointless,

counterproductive, and immensely expensive wars, neither of which has any prospect of
ending anytime soon.

• Dept. of Homeland Security. This is the largest and most dangerous of all agencies, now
with its own gigantic campus in Washington, DC. It will never go away and centralizes
the functions of a police state.

• Guantanamo. Hundreds of individuals, most of them (like the Uighurs recently in the
news) guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are incarcerated for
years. A precedent is set for anyone who is accused of being an “enemy combatant” to be
completely deprived of any rights at all.

• Abu Ghraib and Torture. After imprisoning scores of thousands of foreign nationals,
Bush made it a U.S. policy to use torture to extract information, based on a suspicion or
nothing but a guard’s whim. This is certainly one of the most damaging things to the
reputation of the U.S. ever. It says to the world, “We stand for nothing.”

• The No-Fly List. His administration has placed the names of over a million people on
this list, and it’s still growing at about 20,000 a month. I promise it will be used for other
purposes in the future…
 • The TSA. Somehow the Bush cabal found 50,000 middle-aged people who were willing
to go through their fellow citizens’ dirty laundry and take themselves quite seriously. God
forbid you’re not polite to them…

• Farm Subsidies. Farm subsidies are the antithesis of the free market. Rather than trying
to abolish or cut them back, Bush signed a record $190 billion farm bill.

• Legislative Free Ride. And he vetoed less of what Congress did than any other president
in history.
The only reason I can imagine why a person who is not “evil” (to use a word he favored),
completely uninformed, or thoughtless would favor Bush is because he wasn’t a Democrat. Not
that there’s any real difference between the two parties anymore…

As disastrous as he was, I rather hate to put him in competition for “worst president” in the
company of Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Johnson, and Nixon. He is
simply too small a character – psychologically aberrant, ignorant, unintelligent, shallow,
duplicitous, small-minded – to merit inclusion in any list. On second thought, looking over that
list of his personal characteristics, he’s probably most like FDR, except he lacked FDR’s polish
and rhetorical skills. I suspect he’ll just fade away as a non-entity, recognized as an
embarrassment. Not even worth the trouble of hanging by his heels from a lamp post, although
Americans aren’t (yet) accustomed to doing that to their leaders. Those who once supported him
will, at least if they have any circumspection and intellectual honesty, feel shame at how dim
they were to have been duped by a nobody.

The worst shame of Bush – worse than the spending, the new agencies, the torture, or the wars –
is that he used so much pro-liberty and pro-free-market rhetoric in the very process of destroying
those institutions. That makes his actions ten times worse than if an avowed socialist had done
the same thing. People will blame the full suite of disasters Bush caused on the free market
simply because Bush constantly said he believed in it.

And he’s left OBAMA! with a fantastic starting point for what I expect to be even greater
intrusions into your life and finances. Eventually, the Bush era will look like The Good Old
Days. But only in the way that the Romans looked back with nostalgia on Tiberius and Claudius
after they got Caligula. And then Nero. And then the first of many imperial coups and civil wars.

Only by looking at the past can we make sure that history won’t repeat itself. But most of the
time, Doug and his co-editors of The Casey Report look at the future. They analyze budding
trends for potential money-making opportunities and share that research with their subscribers…
usually for two- or three-digit gains. One of their favorite investments of 2009 is a play on an
economic inevitability that is almost guaranteed to bring early birds big returns. Read more here.