The Reverse Midas Touch

There is a common thread running through the Bush Administration (other than the part about being so incompetent that if he ran a restaurant, the menu would consist of a selection of soup sandwiches), and that is this:

Let the Next President Do It.

Whether from laziness or incompetence or a desire not to harm his wealthy friends, George Bush basically does nothing other than create problems or delay resolving problems so the next person to sit in his office has to fix what he ignored.

Iraq is obvious.

Federal deficits are another. Bush went from inheriting budget surpluses that were paying down the Federal debt to massive deficit spending, the logical result of giving tax breaks to the wealthy while ratcheting up spending. His recent conversion to being a "fiscal conservative" is about as convincing as the John Wayne Gacy Children's Fund.

NASA is another. Bush announced his plans to go to the Moon and Mars; plans that are largely going to be carried out and paid for by future generations. The main effect of his grandiose schemes has been to cripple other NASA programs, including those which monitor the climate of the Earth.

The near total destruction of the senior levels of the Federal civil service is another topic that has been widely ignored, other than what happened to FEMA and the conversion of the Justice Department into an employment agency serving those law schools that offer courses in over-the-road truck driving. Bush and his henchmen have tried to destroy the professionalism of the Federal civil service and replace those professionals with ideological idiots. To see the inevitable outcome of that sort of effort writ large, take a look at how the Coalition Provisional Authority operated. The CPA was mostly staffed with ideologues, it certainly wasn't staffed with people who had any idea how to do the job.

Climate change may possibly be the one thing that Bush is remembered for long after the last veteran of the Iraq War has been buried in the early years of the 22nd Century. His insistence on "voluntary limits" on greenhouse gases has been a flop, which would be expected by anyone with more than three functioning neurons. That was a dumb an idea as voluntary taxes or speed limits. But now, seven years into his illegitimate tenure, with mounting evidence that his stance on climate change has only served the interests of Dick Cheney's buddies in the "awl bidness", he now tries to say that he is concerned about the issue?

In all of these areas, Bush creates or ignores problems that his successors will have to fix. Our Mountain-Biking Preznit has trashed almost everything he touched.

In truth, he had the Reverse Midas Touch: Everything he touched turned to shit.