Let history decide if what we did was bad.

[sinkingfeeling]

Excellent op-ed by student editor, Ben Zenitsky, Ohio State University.

http://media.www.thelantern.com/media/storage/paper333/news/2008/03/07/Opinion/Let-History.Decide.If.What.We.Did.Was.Bad-3258888.shtml?reffeature=htmlemailedition

President George W. Bush likes to say that history will decide - or rather, will be the decider of - how his now-miserably unpopular administration will be judged. Apparently we are all to be of the mindset that in the years to come we will see that Iraq did in fact have a hand in Sept. 11 and that had we left Saddam Hussein in power any longer, he himself would have hijacked a plane and rerouted it for the White House. Perhaps we will discover Iraq actually did have a city-sized underground cache of WMDs, that Osama bin Laden had been hiding here in the U.S. all along, right under our noses and that the NSA domestic spying program ended up nabbing him. Maybe it will one day be unearthed that Halliburton was awarded all those no-bid contracts because it truly was the best and most capable company to handle the job its former CEO's secreted Energy Task Force clandestinely planned out well before the attacks on Sept. 11.

Perhaps it will be revealed that former Ambassador Joe Wilson had lied and Iraq truly had been buying yellow-cake uranium from Niger, that his wife, exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame-Wilson, was a double agent, hellbent on selling our secrets to Kim Jong Il or that those millions of White House e-mails might have accidentally been deleted by an intern or a janitor. Maybe we will find out the country is united, not divided, that the human being and fish can actually coexist peacefully or that Sen. John McCain does actually have an illegitimate black child as Karl Rove spread around South Carolina during the 2000 GOP primaries. Maybe Harriet Miers would have made a great Supreme Court Justice despite her never having been a judge. It could still be discovered that those eight federal prosecutors fired in 2006 were actually working with the terrorists and attempting to subvert the American justice system from within. Perhaps former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales truly had no idea what the hell was going on in his department.

Whatever history does end up unveiling with regard to the now-waning Bush administration, one thing is certain: The nation is reeling. Seven years of incompetence and incessant scandals have left the American citizenry both wary-eyed and weary-bodied of politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and the growing military-industrial complex once so aptly prophecied by the outgoing (Republican) commander in chief Dwight Eisenhower in 1961.

Whether Bush's reliance on the future to prove the majority of Americans and the world wrong about him and his administration ends up bearing fruit for him is something - I suppose - we will have to wait on. However, no one can better assess the quality of a presidency better than those who lived through it. And those people have spoken.

[TransitJohn]

1. Thanks for posting.

It's good some students get it.

[Sadie4629]

2. "no one can better assess the quality of a presidency better than those who lived through it. "

I guess I don't necessarily agree with this line. I think any presidenct can only be judged in the context of the larger picture. And it takes a span of decades to be able to do that.

[Demeter]

3. NO Amount of Reflection Will Turn 2000-2008 Into a Golden Age

It will just look worse and worse as time and revelations go on.