As we follow the news on the George W. Bush Library taking shape at Southern Methodist University, it keeps reminding me that his tenure was the most destructive presidency the nation has endured. In my sense of history, it has seemed so destined from the start.

Always the spoiled and wayward son, he struck me as cavalier in his attitude, possibly seeing himself as a bit bigger than the office. Was there any office big enough for a man whose name slicked him through Yale and a Harvard MBA, while it also detoured him into the Texas Air Guard and out of Vietnam, and wasted the public investment in the pilot’s training that he failed to repay by active service?

Unelected by popular vote, he was settled in the White House by Republican sway over the Supreme Court, which blocked the recount of the Florida vote that could have decided the election fairly. If his unearned victory awakened any humility, it never showed. As if owed the office, he ruled more by impulse than reason.

His most haunting mistake was choosing equally wayward, saber-rattling Dick Cheney for vice president.  They ruled more by ego than by the duty declared in the oath of office. This shows consistently in decisions that continue to spread harm.

WAR: They were bent upon going to war in Iraq even before they took office. To crush the despotic tyrant Saddam Hussein would showcase the “shock and awe” of U.S. military might – never mind cost or other consequences. There was no preparation for the soaring budget deficits it made inevitable. The real “shock and awe” fell upon the taxpayers, picking up the tab for the large and prolonged army of occupation and the restoration of infrastructure and basic services, and piling up a long string of bloated contracts for Halliburton, the company Cheney headed before the election.

TAXES: They insisted on across-the-board tax cuts that no one was asking for, ignoring the certainty that war would devour the budget surpluses left by the second Clinton term and turn the budget red. The Reagan deficits, which more than doubled national debt, were historic coming from a Republican president whose party had always been devoted to fiscal responsibility. The Iraq War put GWB on course to more than double the debt again: a towering legacy of two-for-two for the up-side-down GOP.

HOUSING: The push for more homeownership that President Clinton started was grown by Bush-Cheney into a huge and fragile bubble that made a shambles of the economy when it burst. Job growth under Bush had been strongest in home construction, and it faded fast as mortgage banking went into a tailspin along with sales. Falling prices left a sea of homes worth less than their mortgage, and foreclosures soared as owners in droves abandoned their property to the banks. It was the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007, from which recovery continues to sputter under the evolving job markets  for which most jobless are unprepared.

CLASS WARFARE: The arrested growth of the middle class that began with the invasion of Washington by the Reagan crowd of neocons and their economic game of “trickle down” struck a pause in the Clinton years of workforce expansion and budget surpluses. But it soon quickened under GWB and his doubling down on Reaganomics. The middle class found itself  sandwiched between soaring wealth above and growing poverty below. The spread of earnings top to bottom had grown from a gap to a yawning chasm, with the middle class shrinking relatively in both size and pay, yet

bearing the heaviest responsibility for the unprecedented mountains of public and private debt that goes on growing. Bush-Cheney left office with poverty and joblessness gripping a far larger population than the number bearing those hardships in the Great Depression. They promised “compassionate conservatism,” but delivered neither. It will be interesting to see what the Bush Library does with this hollow promise.

Our mountainous debt stands as a cruel monument to the excesses that have been imposed on WeThePeople by the power grab of the neocons led by two Republican presidents, both of whom defaulted badly, and seemingly blindly, on the GOP’s historic devotion to fiscal responsibility. They turned the federal budget into an ever-flowing milk cow of corporate welfare. It’s an ironic turn of GOP history that Presidents Reagan and Bush II would distinguish themselves as the biggest spenders in the history of the office.

Just how much of this record will be portrayed honestly and accurately in the Bush II Library remains to be seen. SMU’s integrity as an academic institution will be called to account, as will the good Methodist name, by the authenticity with which it brings the larger record into public view. But when it’s so displayed, from the falsified need for an unnecessary war and the hurried tax cuts, to the dicey upsurge in homeownership and the growth of corporate welfare and power, to the empowerment of neocons at the expense of an overburdened middle class, it’s a record that clearly marks the Bush-Cheney tenure as the most destructive presidency in history.

Does this proudly capitalistic nation have the resiliency still to live down this dismal chapter? Not unless capitalism reawakens to its essential purpose of spreading wealth faster than it concentrates it.   On that score, the current thrust does not look promising.

Frank Mensel – February 2013