I had a look back at the archives to see what I was writing about a year ago, and even two years ago, on July 7. The results were intriguing. On both occasions I was in the mood for writing, with four posts in 2008, and five in 2007. I’ve selected the most interesting from each day, heavily biased as I am, in order to reflect on whether my opinions have changed at all.
The first one was a long piece I did on George W Bush. I had heard so much rhetoric about “W” during his long eight years in office, that I really wanted to take a non-partisan and objective look at whether he had actually done as poorly as his detractors were saying. As it turns out, the criticisms at home are what really damaged his reputation, despite the perception here in Canada that it was his foreign policy and invasion of Iraq.
George Bush was at the time slated to leave the country with a debt of $9.2 trillion. He actually wound up finishing his term with a an $11.3 trillion public debt, or roughly double what he began with when he took office in 2000. And while the United States experienced some moderate economic good times, the crash in the latter part of 2008 really put an exclamation point on his domestic economic strategies.
Having said that, it’s interesting to see how quickly Barack Obama has erased the perception of George W Bush as a poor steward for the economy, amid massive corporate bailouts, a $787 billion stimulus plan, and projections for a deficit that will rival that of the second world war, or 12% of GDP alone.
This paragraph in particular isn’t very prophetic:
While I haven’t even addressed health care, crime, the massive changes to laws and freedoms, or other important domestic policies, I think the above criteria show very tangible reasons to be dubious of claims this has been the “best” President in history. What I look forward to is a fiscally responsible President in office for the next term who focuses on economic strategies for growth recovery, and foreign strategies to get the United States out of some of the military positions that are a financial drain on the citizens.
Of interest, the July 7, 2007 entry I wrote is related to the Bush administration as well. French Housing Minister Christine Boutin in Nicholas Sarkozy’s cabinet implied at the time that George W Bush was responsible for the attacks on his own country on 9/11.
I have a theory about the “truthers”, and it’s based on more than just the fact that there are evident inconsistencies and problems with the official version of events from that day. The fact is that the United States will always be a hot bed of controversy for conspiracy theories, whether it be John F Kennedy’s assassination, aliens in Roswell, or the “truth” behind 9/11. Because of the great power the country wields, the kind of influence and sway it holds over other countries, and it’s popularity in the world both as a superpower and a villain, it’s inevitable that there will be these kinds of theories and inventions. Rather than accept the fact that a complete breakdown in intelligence, poor defensive planning, and an indefatigable determination by Muslim terrorists to murder innocent people, it’s tempting to believe that some kind of nefarious Machiavellian plot from some super powerful group of Illuminati ordered the attack so that they could secure oil rights in the Middle East.
The reason some people are bound to believe in such imagination is that, in a sick kind of way, it’s entertaining and intriguing. Certainly more so than coming to terms with the more sobering truth; that a group of fundamentalists from the third world were able to infiltrate and hijack four airplanes with murderous ease, leaving the once seemingly indomitable empire looking, for a brief moment, completely terrified.
