Recently I told my brother Rick, a fellow blogger, that it had been a while since I had posted an anti-Bush rant. At this point, it almost seems like piling on. Most people now realize what a hideous failure the Bush administration has been and how it has severely damaged our place in the world and destroyed any claim to moral authority. The exceptions would be people who:

• Watch Fox News 24/7 and/or worship Rush Limbaugh.
• Have been kept in a medically induced coma.

I continually read stories which reference blunders by the Bush administration, but it’s done in almost a so-so way, as if Bush’s incompetence is old news and there’s no sense dwelling on it. We’re just killing time now until he leaves office and someone new can try to restore some sanity to what has been a self-indulgent, arrogant romp. Things which might have disturbed me in previous years now seem ho-hum, just more (as if we need more) evidence of how severely Bush has botched up my country.

Here are four items I’ve come across recently. Nothing spectacular about any of them, alone, but when put together, along with dozens of other stories…well, historians are going to have a hey-dey.

• It’s well-known now that disbanding the Iraqi military was a huge error which contributed heavily to the insurgency and civil war. I read this week that we also shut down all state-run industries, thereby putting tens of thousands more people out of work. Since these included fertilizer factories, farmers were affected and food production declined. Such was the arrogance of ideologues intent on turning Iraq into a free-market economy.
• Anti-American radicals throughout the Middle East were upset when Bin Laden attacked America. Their greatest asset was Afghanistan–a country which welcomed their presence and provided a base for training. But after 9/11, nobody–including the Death to America Islamists–could blame America for invading Afghanistan. We destroyed an almost irreplaceable asset, this terrorist haven, and Al Qaeda was practically obliterated. Until we invaded Iraq. The Death to America crowd thanks Bush for invading Iraq, because in so doing, we revived a terrorist movement which had almost been vanquished. Up from the ashes of Afghanistan was born a whole new generation of anti-American terrorists. Good job, George.
• Meanwhile, in Russia, Vladimir Putin has killed nearly all of the press freedoms which emerged from the reforms of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and now is actively assassinating opponents and critics (13 journalists have been assassinated). The Russian parliament even passed a law permitting the assassination of Russians living abroad who were speaking out against the Russian government. But the US has no moral authority here. Not when we abduct people from one country and spirit them away to another country to be tortured–not because there’s a ticking bomb and they know the location, but because we think they know something that might, possibly, be of some value to us. Not when we give the bird to the Geneva Conventions. Not when we flagrantly disregard basic legal and privacy rights. Not when we create prisons and torture centers in other countries to get around our own laws. No, thanks to George Bush, America has no claim to moral authority. We have no business lecturing Russia, or China, or anyone else. And that is a huge, huge tragedy.
• Iran, it turns out, was actually helping us a lot in Afghanistan and in other ways in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Many moderates and reformers in Iran wanted to normalize relations with the US. Iran even agreed to pay $500 million to help rebuild Afghanistan. But one week after that agreement, George Bush included them in his “Axis of Evil” speech. Iran’s hard-liners pronounced, “See! We told you that Iran and the US can’t be friends!” The moderates and reformers shrunk into the background, and the hard-liners took control. And now, Iran is a formidable, resolute enemy of the United States. An enemy that George Bush created.

Stories like these emerge all the time, and in the years ahead, as respected historians tackle these eight years, much more will come to light. But I’ve heard so much that nothing will surprise me. I voted for this guy twice–I trusted him–and he trashed our country’s reputation and influence.

Okay, Rick, I got this out of my system for a while.