George W. Bush

Like William McKinley, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Donald Trump, and other such presidents, George W. Bush was in command of the American government during one of its crucial moments. He was in control of the country when 19 Islamic fundamentalists, under the orders of Osama bin Laden, hijacked a group of American luxury planes and flew them into the Pentagon and Twin Towers in a horrific tragedy known today as 9/11. Bush had to steer the country in a direction toward hope and perseverance in one of the most dreadful periods in its history. He had to guide the country through the conflicts that stemmed from the incident. While his response to these crises wasn't as inept as those instituted by Trump. Buchanan, and the other presidents cited at the beginning of this essay, it was incredibly flawed. And even out of his poor handling of his nation's crises, Bush proved to be an atrocious president.

To begin, I will note that, while Bush generally demonstrated faulty leadership during the issues of his day, he did have a few accomplishments. Since the Taliban was granting asylum to Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11, I do agree with the initial invasion of Afghanistan. Now, I do believe that the American military should have withdrawn from Afghanistan much sooner than it did. However, that's more of a fault with the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, as they presided over the conflict's least necessary and oldest stages. Bush also initiated the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an extremely successful program to fund AIDS research and treatment across the globe. I also give Bush credit for establishing the Department of Homeland Security. My final bit of praise for Bush's presidency stems from the Unborn Victims Act. Signed in 2004, this law stated that if someone killed a pregnant woman and, by proxy, the fetus in her womb, they would be charged not only with the murder of the woman, but her unborn baby as well. However, Bush did little else of good.

A little over a year after 9/11, at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003, Bush began spreading false allegations against Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq since 1979. More specifically, Bush claimed that Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction and that he had connections to al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the 9/11 attacks. Using these statements - which have been proven to be false - as an excuse, Bush, on March 20, 2003, sent American troops to Iraq, beginning a conflict known as the Iraq War. While Saddam Hussein was obviously a brutal dictator, Bush did not carry the burden of dismantling his horrid regime. If the people of Iraq wanted Bush to intervene, then I would support Bush's actions. However, most Iraqis opposed this action by Bush. The Iraq War was an unnecessary act of bloodthirsty imperialism that led to tens of thousands of American and Iraqi deaths. This alone drags him down to the bottom half of US presidents. However, the Iraq War was merely Bush's most egregious misdeed.

Other aspects of Bush's response to 9/11 were very flawed. For example, he founded the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, which has routinely been shown to host hideous violations of human rights. Additionally, at the same time that he dramatically increased spending to fund his invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, he cut taxes. This caused the national debt to skyrocket, further damaging Bush's quality as a president. Bush also demonstrated atrocious crisis leadership in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Perhaps the worst element of Bush's domestic response to 9/11 - I consider things like the creation of the camp at Guantanamo Bay and the Iraq War as part of his foreign and geopolitical response to the attack - is the PATRIOT Act. Officially titled the USA Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, the law was signed by Bush on October 26, 2001, in an attempt to prevent future travesties like 9/11. In essence, the PATRIOT Act permitted the government to survey private communication between American citizens in the pursuit of fighting terrorism. This is a horrific encroachment upon our civil liberties. Honestly, it resembles the British government during and immediately before the Revolutionary War, as in 1774, it passed a law requiring town councils in the 13 Colonies to receive London's permission to meet before actually gathering. Any president whose actions resemble that of King George III and his parliament is worthy of undying admonishment.

The PATRIOT Act wasn't the only abysmal domestic policy instituted by Bush, however. As president, Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB, repealed by Barack Obama in 2015, was an education law that reduced federal funding to schools with lower average grades. This may sound reasonable, but in actuality, it was a disastrous idea. If the majority of a school's students are doing poorly, that means that the school doesn't have access to the materials needed to successfully teach its students. Reducing federal aid to these schools leaves them with less money to access these vital resources. So, it traps these schools in a vicious cycle where their students do poorly, so they lose additional funding, and so have less money to meet their needs, and so they do even worse, causing their students to perform even worse. And then, the cycle resumes.

Bush was an awful president who launched a bloody, imperialist war against Iraq and its people on a bed of gross lies, violated human rights, plunged his country into debt, and doomed American schools and students to a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and disappointment. While there were certainly worse presidents, Bush exists in the bottom 10 regardless.