humanities.philosophy.objectivism

That, as you all know, is from Hamlet. But I was thinking about Bush.
It may come as a surprise to those who tuned in late that I look back
on what is presumably now the completed record with great ambivalence.

(1) He ran as, and governed symbolically as, the most openly and
militantly Christian president in American history, instead of
invoking what Bellah called the American civil religion. That's bad.
As mitigation, "faith-based initiatives" seem to have gone mostly
nowhere.

(2) One stupefying temporary misstep aside (nominating his personal
aide) he made one excellent and one very good nomination to the
Supreme Court.

(3) On the one hand, he consistently kept taxes low. On the other, he
did little to rein in spending when it was politically feasible to do
so, preferring to govern by the old Dem strategy of constituent
bribery, and thereby set up the party for accusations of corruption,
squandering a time-honored issue.

(4) Responding to an unprecedented national catastrophe, and without
the help of any prior preparation by the Pentagon, he fought a
brilliant improvisational war in Afghanistan to victory. On the other
hand, his ill-advised and disastrously mismanaged expansion of that
war into Iraq cost billions of dollars (so far), his party's control
of Congress (and probably the White House--we'll see), the assistance
and good will of long-standing and hard-won alliances, strengthened
theocratic Iran, shredded military preparedness and force projection
capacities, while handing (both through the invasion itself, and the
flirtation with prisoner torture) a propaganda coup to radical Islam.

(5) He has consistently pursued a constitutional path of asserting the
inherent powers of the executive at the expense of (a) separation of
powers, and (b) criminal procedural liberties. Though a more assertive
executive is appropriate during wartime, on both scores, he went too
far; the costs will only become apparent when these powers
subsequently get used by future presidents in other settings.