The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

Frank Rich – A President Forgotten but Not Gone – NYTimes.com.

Sorry Mr. Rich, but for a progressive Texan there is no puzzlement about the Presidents failure…It was a foregone conclusion. The only real puzzlement is how the man got into the White House to start with and how he stayed there for two terms.

Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

If this is the best case that even Bush and his handlers can make for his achievements, you wonder why they bothered.

The only good thing that can be said is that most of us will survive the trainwreck that is the Bush Legacy…Not as well as we might have survived any other Commander-in-Chief for the past eight years. and the return to health for this country will be long and leave many out in the cold for a few years that they shouldn’t have been…But we have survived George W Bush…