With the opening of the Bush Presidentin’ Center in Texas this week, the cottage industry of “Rehabilitation: Mission Accomplished!” is now in full swing. Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider:
Bush doesn’t get enough credit for saving the economy in late 2008. Had to be a maverick and buck his own party.
— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) April 25, 2013
Oh and this:
Well put from @jimpethokoukis “Bush’s six-year economic record, from 2001 through 2006, was OK, actually.” aei-ideas.org/2013/04/time-t…
— Joseph Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) April 25, 2013
The Bush presidency only existed from September 12, 2001 until December 31, 2006. The rest of the time was Obama, you see. As such, we have no choice but to attack the Obama administration’s now comparatively abysmal record on terrorism as well.
EconWatcher
OT, but Tbogg is a genius. We are not worthy.
Nine days after Tbogg called attention to a twerpy-looking staffer from the Romney-Ryan campaign who was starting his own political blog, well, this happened:
http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2013/04/24/fear-and-fapping-on-campaign-trail-2012/#comment-121522
As Tbogg himself noted, “I sure can pick ’em.”
LittlePig
Good grief. Bad enough to get the lyin’ ass ‘He kept us safe’ cowpie. Now W saved the economy (by burning it to the damn ground).
Wonder what color the sky is in FoxWorld?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
This guy is extraordinary
Iraq is one of those “couple huge things”, even with the modifier, that sounds dismissive. I have no idea how he was “dealt a terrible hand”.
Linda Featheringill
Actually, I thought that under the circumstances [which were terrible], Bush acted well during the last of 2008. He had no idea how we got into that mess and he had no idea of how to get out of the mess. He was open and cooperative with the leading candidates for the presidency. He supported TARP and other measures. And he did not criticize the way that Obama handled things.
He never was competent enough to be President, you know. In this case, he acted in what he probably thought was the best interest of the country.
[It’s too early to have to defend Bush. Gah!]
John
I suppose it’s not entirely unreasonable to say that Bush deserves credit for TARP, which appears to have saved the economy from a complete meltdown and which did involve Bush ignoring the lunatics in his own party.
The HBO film Too Big to Fail was not completely implausible in making Paulson the hero of the piece, and the late period Bush Administration really was more pragmatic and less ideological (a Democratic congress helped!).
But should Bush really get credit for not letting the economy completely collapse? Isn’t that the least we should expect a president to do? Isn’t this, to coin a phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectations?
c u n d gulag
New GOP POV:
Actually, Bill Clinton was President until 9/12, when the SCOTUS, seeing how badly he handled intel before the attack, rightfully replaced him with W.
And W had to leave the Presidency, due to a severe pretzel allergy (and the fact that Dick Cheney kept insisting on carrying a bag of them on him all of the time, insisting they were good for his heart) right before Katrina, when he knew the “Blah” folks in New Orleans would appreciate having one of their own handle the the coming hurricane and its aftermath, and graciously gave his office to Obama – who then promptly grossly mis-handled the situation.
In the meantime, George W. Bush led the greatest economic recovery since FDR, Truman, and Ike.
And he successfully fought a war on two fronts, that would have made FDR jealous – all while expanding people Civil Liberties.
‘There, we covered his ass!’
c u n d gulag
Oh, and my other favorite, was Jen-Ru saying that outside of 9/11, there were no domestic terror attacks.
Uhm – anthrax, Jen-Ru?
Among others.
And ignoring 9/11 would have been like, back in late November of 1963, someone saying, “Well Mrs. Kennedy, outside of that unfortunate little incident, how was the rest of your trip to our fair city of Dallas?”
Baud
Bush seemed to genuinely care for his dog.
EconWatcher
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Dealt a bad hand? After 9-11, he had a level of popularity and national unity that would have allowed him to do just about anything he wanted. At that moment, he was more powerful than any president since FDR in his first term.
What could a real leader have done with that? Oh, maybe launch a national campaign to wean us off of fossil fuels once and for all, for example. And that would have been a rather devastating response to the people who actually attacked us.
Instead, he advised us all to go shopping, take some more tax cuts, and get ready to wage war on a country that had nothing to with the terrorist attack. That’s how he spent his capital. Preaching to the choir here, but bad hand? Without 9-11, he would have been out on his ear in 2004.
Feudalism Now!
The country did not erupt into civil war and anarchy while he spent a 1/4 of his time in office clearing brush in Crawford. So yeah… Good job, Brownie.
The United States of America did not cease to exist after 8 years of his misrule, so he has that going for him.
GWB work on AIDS in Africa was a good thing that he did. Doesn’t counter balance the harm done.
different-church-lady
Pethokoukis’ quote is like saying, “Bob was really fine until his 17th beer.”
RSA
It’s like quitting your job and running up your credit card bills. Yeah, you could do that for six years…
SteveM
The rest of the time was Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton’s penis.
TriassicSands
@EconWatcher:
LBJ was riding pretty high after JFK’s assassination. Sadly, with all their effective power, both made horrendous errors of judgment concerning wars.
Patrick
@John:
TARP was not free. And TARP would not have been needed in the first place if Bush had done his damned job the first 7 years of his presidency…
weaselone
It’s not being dealt a terrible hand if you search through multiple decks and construct it completely of jokers.
Todd
@Linda Featheringill:
That had to hurt.
NotMax
Like saying that from August 1 to August 28, 2005 his monthly record on dealing with hurricane relief was unblemished.
Mike Lamb
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: God made him stupid…
RaflW
@John: Not only that, but is Bush to get none of the blame for the bubble, the unregulated un-banks, the various agencies he was responsible for administering taking a maximalist laissez-faire attitude towards predatorily lending, derivatives trading, etc?
OK, so he and his ship of fools finally did a few things like TARP to keep the global economy from an epic implosion. But the same guys were laying the dynamite for at least 7 years.
MomSense
“The Bush presidency only existed from September 12, 2001 until December 31, 2006. The rest of the time was Obama, you see.”
YES! It is incredible how often I have spoken with people who believe this. I spoke with a man who was adamant that President Obama caused the Wall St crash of September 2008–I was ready to scream CHECK A GD CALENDAR!!! It is crazy town with those folks.
shecky
“Bush’s six-year economic record, from 2001 through 2006, was OK, actually.”
Yes, just like Jennifer Rubin pointing out that Dubya’s record on keeping us free from terrorist bombing is very good after 09/11/2001.
Baud
I love how TARP is now a good thing since it’s being ascribed to Bush and not Obama.
MomSense
@John:
Ok, but the proposal that Paulsen presented to Congress was 3 pages of giving the banks lots of money with zero oversight.
It was actually candidate Obama who used the power of his platform as nominee and those of us who were organizing for his campaign who pushed for oversight, changing it to a loan, and pretty much all of the attempts at accountability that TARP eventually included.
Paulsen’s TARP proposal was a disaster.
RaflW
Gee, what happened in 2006 in Weisenthanll’s mind? The Dems retook Congress. So it’s really all Nancy Pelosi’s fault.
Perhaps Joe should debate a Pelosi poster on an empty sidewalk. Doing that would, at this point, improve his credibility.
Linda Featheringill
@Todd:
Yes, it did hurt. :-)
JasperL
Greenspan had the perfect quote as he was addressing the banking crisis: “With notably rare exceptions (2008 for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates”
And with notably rare exceptions (War in Iraq, Katrina response, loss of 50,000 manufacturing plants, allowing the largest banks to self regulate and blow up the world financial system, for example) Bush was an excellent President.
Similarly, with notably rare exceptions (the attacks on 9/11, anthrax attacks, and thousands of attacks targeted at U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example) Bush kept us safe from terrorists.
Crooked Timber has many variations here.
RaflW
Yeah, and with notably rare exceptions, Japan’s nuclear power industry operated safely.
Revisionism is easy if no one gives a crap about the truth.
gnomedad
@EconWatcher:
Some say* that it’s a good thing
Gore lostBush was given the Presidency by the Supreme Court because a Democrat would have been crucified after 9/11 (assuming Gore would not have thwarted it after actually paying attention to intelligence reports).* Sorry about the Bush meme; too lazy to research the details.
themann1086
@TriassicSands: Good point. At least LBJ left some positive legacy, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and what survived of his Great Society programs. What of Bush’s legacy is positive?
ETA: Clarifying, since that last bit came off as accusatory, but I was just being rhetorical.
Morzer
@Baud:
Bush had every reason to care for his only friend.
liberal
@RaflW:
IMHO, Bush’s contribution was relatively small. In fact, one could reasonably argue that Clinton’s was bigger than Bush’s. Meaning, by the time Bush took over, the damage was done.
Of course, one could counterargue that Bush could have gone back on deregulation of finance, but at that point it was pretty much a bipartisan affair.
John
@Patrick:
Agreed on the second part. The fact that TARP wasn’t free doesn’t seem relevant: something along the lines of TARP was necessary, and it worked out a lot better than some people feared.
Citizen_X
Thus it was nailed a few years back:
I SCREWED YOU ALL…BUT THANKS FOR BLAMING IT ON THE BLACK GUY
liberal
@John:
Right. It wasn’t so much that Bush was bold and brave in stemming a collapse. It’s rather that his admin pushed policies that the mainstream elite of both parties wanted, given the circumstances.
The only adversity he faced were the right-wing Congressional nutjobs, who (unlike, say, Adam Smith writing centuries before) apparently think it’s fine to have an unregulated banking sector and to do nothing when it collapses.
liberal
@John:
Of course it’s relevant, if you think more broadly in terms of opportunity cost, not a mere nominal price tag. It means our best shot at destroying or containing the parasitic institutions that put us in that position to begin with is now gone, and with it our best chance of preventing it from happening again (and from preventing the parasites from sucking hundreds of billions in rent out of the economy every year).
patrick II
I was channel surfing just now and came across president bush on fox saying about 9/11:
“I believed that we cannot lose our values in the midst of tragedy…” before I surfed on.
I was amazed just by the seven or so seconds of Bushness. As I watched him, it seems he has no idea of what he has done, because in real life, not the imaginary one of not losing our values he was sharing with us on fox, he started torturing people and holding secret meetings to decide how we split up the (sp)oils of war, and then lying about intelligence and using as a pretext for going to war, and on and on…
Not losing “values” doesn’t mean to George what it means to me.
NotMax
@ themann1086
The Do Not Call Registry.
(see: squirrel, blind; nuts)
RaflW
@John:
Well, yes. A massive injection of liquidity had a stabilizing effect. Just the fact of government action probably helped to calm the frightened markets.
I think where the public has been screwed is that the banks got pretty much whatever they wanted, and taxpayers got bupkus in terms of help with their mortgages. Yes, the public got to not have a cascading failure of global capitalism (hey, that’s great!) but the deals were structured to save banking’s bacon and leave loan mods to the discretion of the idiots who tried to profit from their own decade of bad ideas.
Keith
This is crazy. The entire 2000s starting with 2001 was anemic at best except for about a 2 year period where the job market was “OK” (and salary expansion stopped very abruptly, if not contracte a bit). It was a double-dip recession, and I am surprised so many people forget it.
RaflW
@Keith: Well, but to these hacks, “the economy” is the stock market plus maybe topline unemployment numbers. That’s it.
And the Dow was fan-fucking-tastic for a longish run there. And now it’s roaring back, and the already rich are again in the private fast-lane, leaving everyone else behind.
When the financial press talks about the economy, they’re talking about their own economy. These are rich guys writing for other rich guys, and f*ck the rest of us, except to the extent that they can talk us into buying the stinking stocks they want to unload.
catclub
The only part of his legacy that is of value: He said no to Cheney on bombing and invading Iran. Pepfar.
John
The Titanic’s voyage from England to 41 degrees 46 minutes longitude was also pretty good. Beyond that, not so much.
Cacti
Being a modern Republican requires beliefs that are demonstrably false.
Jenghazi Rubin’s latest Bush fluffing column wrote that we enjoyed 7 1/2 years of job growth and prosperity during his reign.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the economy lost jobs in 39 of the months he was in office.
Jennifer
Uh, yeah. If you disregard the fact that it took 5 full years for employment to reach 2001 levels. If you disregard the fact that during this entire period, real wages for workers were static or falling. If you disregard the fact that ordinary working folk were already so tapped out on their lines of credit that a housing bubble had to be inflated so they could continue to buy anything at all. If you ignore the fact that without said housing bubble, which when it burst almost took the entire world economy down with it, there wouldn’t have been any economy at all. If you ignore the fact that this period represented a massive shift of wealth from the many to the few.
If you overlook all those things, the economy was just barely actually OK, I guess. Just not for most people.
PurpleGirl
@RaflW:
Revisionism is easy if no one gives a crap about the truth.
Yup and Republicans don’t give a crap about truth/facts. They have their beliefs and gut feelings, you know.
TriassicSands
@themann1086:
He made “My Pet Goat” required reading at Harvard? Otherwise, I can’t think of anything.
The Moar You Know
@RaflW: Hate hate hate to say it, but if you’re looking for someone to blame for these specific things you cite, you can blame Clinton for signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall and Greenspan for the rest of it.
PurpleGirl
@The Moar You Know: Remember Greenspan is a Randian. The Republicans (and a few Democrats) loved him for years.
Boots Day
As Jennifer notes, this is just a lie. The economy was in recession from 2001 to 2003. The “OK” part of Bush’s economic record lasted for a little more than half of his years in office.
liberal
@The Moar You Know:
That’s more or less what I posted above.
In any reasonable accounting of the causes of the crisis, Greenspan simply has to be #1 in the list of responsible persons. And it’s plausible that Bush is lower on the list than Clinton.
IMHO Reagan and Milton Friedman have to be high up there, because both of them pushed the general “deregulate everything” nonsense to such a great extent. But I’d still put Greenspan as #1.
gene108
@c u n d gulag:
This is an improvement, in terms of right-wing honesty and integrity, with regards to Bush, Jr.’s Presidency.
I’ve seen right-wing talking heads say on T.V., “there were no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, when Bush, Jr. was President” and it seemed like there was a 50/50 chance the MSM moderator/host would bother pointing out, who was President on 9/11/01.
Mike in NC
I need to turn off MSNBC before the Bushapalooza makes me vomit. Look, there’s Cheney in a cowboy hat!
Maude
@The Moar You Know:
Clinton signed The 2000 commodities Modernization Act. They set off shadow banking and made credit default swaps not insurance and so no capital backing was required. That is what enabled the derivatives to take off and crash land. Clinton told Dean Baker (I hope I got his first name right) that he didn’t think the two bills (including GS) had much to do with the meltdown of 2008.
Rev. Rick
The Bush years economy was abysmal. It took 45 months to recover the jobs lost in the shallow 2001 recession. Here’s the track record of Presidents since Hoover: http://www.statista.com/statistics/238600/gdp-per-capita-growth-by-us-president-from-hoover-to-obama/ . W. ranks near the bottom. And the reason why Truman does so badly is because the US economy grew by an insane 75% during FDR’s third term and it had to come back down to earth in his first term. We know why Obama’s done so bad: the turd sandwich he was handed when he took office plus continued Republican obstructionism.
The Bush tax cuts were sold with the assertion that they would create an explosion of investment and growth. The reality: an elevator economy — the top 1% soared to the penthouse and the rest of us got the shaft.
Maude
When I saw a picture of Bush this morning, Psycho Killer ran through my mind.
scav
@Keith: I don’t get it either. “Jobless recovery” mark one was big first reason I doubted the whole housing boom was sustainable.
sherparick
It is also amazing how the MSM has bought the Republican lie that “there were no Terrorist attacks” on the U.S. after 9/11 (and also amazing that the MSM continues to give Bush a free pass on that one). A quick look at Wikipedia and one discovers Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, “Paris to Miam” December 2001; July 4, 2002, an Egyptian gunman opens fire at an El Al ticket counter in Los Angeles International Airport, killing two Israelis before being killed himself; the “Beltway Sniper” attacks (and where Malvo and Muhammed very much resemble the Boston Marathon bomber brothers) Fall 2002; in 2006 there were the following incidents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammed_Reza_Taheri-azar_SUV_attack; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeed_Aziz_Popal
All of these incidents occurred during period of Mr. Bush’s Presidency. So even the statement “no attacks after 9/11 is a lie.”
Jay in Oregon
@Mike in NC:
Did he have to cut holes in it for his horns?
nellcote
in honor of the new “library”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pojL_35QlSI
Patricia Kayden
The historical revision will work fine with some people (White voters who either voted for Bush or wanted to have a beer with him), but I can’t see it working for those of us who have no reason to like the man (or his policies) at all.
There is nothing he did which was good that makes his presidency redeemable. He was selected by the Supreme Court, did nothing to stop 9/11, lied to get the US into an unnecessary war, wrecked the economy (after inheriting a surplus). People were losing jobs by the hundreds of thousands in the last months of his administration.
Please. If this is to set up Jeb in 2016, good luck with that. Even if he gets a majority of the Southern White vote, that won’t be enough.
RaflW
@The Moar You Know: Look, I know Clinton signed the repeal of Glass-Stegal. I blame Phil Gramm, the Original Senate Turtle, as well as Clinton and all the douches in Congress who passed the repeal.
But Bush’s admin did preside over the agencies that, while defanged, could have bothered to do thing 1 and maybe even thing 2 about cowboy capitalism as it was happening. Enforcing retail lending laws certainly fell under the Bush admin.
Patrick
@John:
Why was it necessary? Since it wasn’t free, who paid for it? And worked better than some people feared? There are entire neighborhoods where I live where almost all the houses are in foreclosure. It is the same history in tons of cities in our country. Worked better for the well-off and banks I guess.
Bush and his people didn’t keep their eyes on the ball. and then they had to play catch-up in 2008. This was one of many reason he took a budget surplus and turned it into a huge budget deficit.
ottercliff
“Bush’s six-year economic record, from 2001 through 2006, was OK, actually.”
Translation: If you cut out the bad years, where he collapsed the economy, the rest of the years were “OK”.
Reminds me of Bush’s college grades: If you cut out the F’s & D’s, the remaining C was OK.
Ken J.
I have come to understand that the 2000 Nader voters came within about a week of achieving their goal.
If George Bush had stuck to his laissez-faire, free-market principles in late 2008, by now we would be living in a progressive New Deal 2 in the political wake of the Bush Depression, and Republicans would have very little power anywhere.
But, Bush had to play FDR. So we got enough prop-up to avoid catastrophe, but not enough to bring in a new progressive era.
Ted & Hellen
And it really is great that Barack did his part today to further the cause of that rehabilitation, don’t you think?