Nearly 10 years ago, a candidate for president of the United States stood before a crowd of New Hampshire voters and made this vow: I will never commit American troops to battle unless swift victory is assured.

If only that guy had been elected, eh?

In fact, he was.

As the hours of George W. Bush's long, tragic presidency draw to a close, it is nearly breathtaking to revisit the New Hampshire campaign that started it all. The reporting on that 2000 race raised questions that remain with us to this day: Does Bush know enough to be president? Is he curious enough about the world? Will his insecurity in discussing the issues of the day allow him to be led astray by hangers-on with stronger views and greater experience? Will his fumbling manner of speech hinder his ability to rally the world to his cause in times of crisis? Will his unwillingness to connect with ordinary people keep Americans from understanding or trusting their president? What's really at his core?

Had voters thought harder about those questions - in 2000 and once more in 2004 - it's quite possible we wouldn't have suffered the disastrous past eight years. Surely no president, particularly one elected in that long-ago pre-Sept. 11 world, can anticipate every crisis and react without stumbling. And yet, consider:

He took the nation to war under false pretenses, leaving thousands of Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis killed and maimed.

He sanctioned the use of torture, dangerously diminishing our moral standing on the world stage.

His hapless response to Hurricane Katrina left terrified victims to languish in the Louisiana Superdome - or drown in their homes.

He scrapped accepted limits on the president's power to interpret and implement the law, a philosophy that brought us warrantless wiretapping, unrestricted detention of suspects in the war on terror, and the use of signing statements to pick and choose which portions of legislation to execute.

He drove the federal budget deficit to new heights.

His Justice Department was compromised by partisanship.

He paid scant attention to the nation's health care crisis as the rolls of the uninsured increased to 45 million - despite a pledge back in New Hampshire that every American should have access to quality, affordable health care.

He refused to wrestle with either the realities of global climate change or finding alternatives to our dangerous addiction to oil.

All this before the greatest financial meltdown in decades, a downturn exacerbated by federal regulators' laissez-faire attitude toward regulation of investment banks.

It's a record made even more heartbreaking when you listen to the Bush of 1999 and 2000 and remember what he thought his presidency was going to be about.


This is a truly odious sentiment. It suggests that expediency is sufficient rationale for war: that Iraq, for instance, would have been justified had it been easy in a push-button-antiseptic sort of way. Well, it wouldn't have. Even when Americans turned against the war, they did so for the wrong reasons! It was MORALLY wrong to unilaterally and preemptively invade another sovereign country. Swift ends don't justify means any more than slow ones do.
Bush came to believe in his own propaganda and bullsh!t. The country has suffered because of those beliefs. Hopefully, it can be repaired, but it will take a very long time and could cost generations the quality of life their parents and grandparents experienced.