Sullivan Sums Up the Bush Administration

As always, [Bill] Kristol's sole principle seems to be the wielding of power. He, like Cheney, is beginning to understand that history is beginning to gel around the assumption that the Bush-Cheney administration presided over the worst attack on US soil in history and failed to capture or bring to justice any of its perpetrators, put the next generation into unparalleled and unsustainable debt, did nothing to combat climate change, viciously opposed the civil rights movement of its time, shrunk the GOP to one in five voters, precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s, took the US into two grueling, unwinnable wars, humiliated the US at the UN with fatally flawed intelligence for war in Iraq, and destroyed the credibility and endurance of the Geneva Conventions, thus ensuring that future captured Americans will be tortured with no recourse.

I sometimes wonder if the Bush Administration's sole purpose was to destroy America's credibility in the eyes of the world.

Phoenix gets it

From a promising new blog by Phoenix:

"It is a hallmark of a sane and moderate society that when it changes leaders and regimes, those left behind should be abandoned to the judgment of history," writes Harvard's Charles Fried in Saturday's NYT op-ed. "It is in savage societies that the defeat of a ruling faction entails its humiliation, exile and murder."

While it remains to be seen if Erik "Money Folder" Holder will sentence Donald Rumsfeld to death, it does appear that Mr. Fried is protesting a bit too much. He is not the first to trot out the shibboleth that punishing those responsible for the Bush administration's various humiliations of the law would do little more than establish a pattern of retribution against outgoing administrations. Leave aside the obvious point that an exiting Obama team guilty of such egregious assaults on the law would be prosecuted on day one (rightfully, albeit not without sanctimony or a moment's hesitation from the GOP and media). The easily elided point here is that we would need not fear this pattern, were an independent Justice department in existence and already in pursuit of those at the heart of the policies. Those perpetrators would have been put on trial in late '06, rather than the rotten fruit they bore.

Not a word there I disagree with.

From Harper's...

Comes A retrospective of the Bush era

Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4

Increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the federal poverty level: 3,500,000

Percentage change since 2001 in the average amount U.S. workers spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses: +172

Estimated percentage by which Social Security benefits would have declined if Bush’s privatization plan had passed: –15 ...

Portion of the $3.3 billion in federal Hurricane Katrina relief spent by Mississippi that has benefited poor residents: 1/4

Boy, is conservatism expensive...

Lithiumcola, at Dailykos, talking about the staggering cost in treasure and human misery of the Bush presidency:

Bilmes and Stiglitz further state, "the total bill for Bush-era excess -- the total new debt combined with the total new accrued obligations -- amounts to $10.35 trillion."

In that time -- that is to say, in the time that Washington was racking up that excess, using that money for something-or-other; the time from when President Bush took office to now -- the cost of a family health insurance premium has gone up 87%; the number of uninsured people has gone up 19%; the number of families living in poverty has gone up 19%; real median household income has dropped 1%; and corporate profits have gone up 68%.

Note that last: everyone is worse off, except the people whom the Republicans really serve: the rich.