The Great Dictator's Legacy

With nearly 3 years still remaining in his term of office, Bush's legacy has already been written and it's fucked. Katrina was completely mishandled if not tantamount to criminal malfeasance.

A full recovery in New Orleans could take 25 years as homeowners, businesses and tourists are coaxed back to the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator said Thursday.

Then there's the the national debt, which was a surplus when Bush took office, and has skyrocketed under his administration.

Sometime in the next two years, the total amount of US government borrowing is going to break through the 10-trillion-dollar mark and, lacking space for the extra digit such a figure would require, the [national debt] clock is in danger of running itself into obsolescence.

The clock's owner, real estate developer Douglas Durst, knew such a problem could arise but hadn't counted on it so soon.

"We really expected it to be quite some time," Durst told AFP. "But now, with the pace of debt growth only increasing, we're looking at maybe two years and certainly before President (George W.) Bush leaves office in 2009."

Oh yes, that illegal war.

President Bush suggested yesterday that US troops might stay in Iraq beyond his presidency, which ends in 2009, saying at a press conference that the issue of removing troops from the country ''will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

And we can't forget global warming and possibly the inevitable end of most life on the planet.

What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea.

Is it fair to say at this point that humans control the climate? Is that possible?

"There's no doubt about that, says Hansen. "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."

Why believe Hansen? Because he knows what he's talking about. To know the earth is his job at NASA. And he's good at it.

Hansen started at NASA more than 30 years ago, spending nearly all that time studying the earth. How important is his work? 60 Minutes asked someone at the top, Ralph Cicerone, president of the nation’s leading institute of science, the National Academy of Sciences.

"I can't think of anybody who I would say is better than Hansen. You might argue that there's two or three others as good, but nobody better," says Cicerone.

And Cicerone, who’s an atmospheric chemist, said the same thing every leading scientist told 60 Minutes."Climate change is really happening," says Cicerone.

These are all problems future administrations and the American people will have to deal with for many years. For the American people, probably for the rest of their lives if not their children's and grandchildren's lives they will be saddled with Bush's legacy.

No matter what party's candidate is elected president in 2008, 2012, 2016 and far into the future, that person will undoubtedly start every single day by saying, "God damn you George W Bush!"

Even with all I've of the above, I've not mentioned the war in Afganistan, the families of the dead and injured in both the Iraq and Afganistan wars, the seriously injured from both of those wars, the costs to care for those seriously injured troops, the distrust of America throughout the world and the stranglehold corporate America has over this country thanks to Bush. I know I'm missing other things. The laundry list is just too long.