Friday, July 04, 2008

The 10 Most Awesomely Bad Moments of the Bush Presidency

http://www.alternet.org/election08/89686/?page=entire

By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted July 1, 2008.


A shorter version of our long national nightmare.
In a lot of ways, choosing the Bush administration's 10 greatest moments -- disastrous failures, all -- is about as pointless as picking out your 10 least favorite hemorrhoids: There are entirely too many of them, and taken together they all add up to a throbbing mass of pain. But unfortunately, history demands that we at least make the effort so that future generations will understand why we perform voodoo rituals cursing Bush's memory before we go to bed every night.

Narrowing down the Bush administration's various debacles to a mere 10 was no easy feat. In fact, I expect that many people will express dismay that their least favorite moment was left off the list. "How could commuting Scooter Libby's sentence not even make the top 10??!!" I can hear some of you shrieking already. Well, I'll tell you. Essentially, I tried to rate each Bush disaster by two main criteria: its body count and its damage to the country's reputation. So while Bush's awkward groping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel may be personally humiliating to everyone, it doesn't have the same heft as, say, the Iraq War.



The Ten. Note-- explanations following each item were left out here.
10: Bush Gets Re-elected
9: Alberto Gonzales' Congressional Testimony
8: North Korea Conducts a Nuclear Test
7: Colin Powell's Bogus WMD Presentation at the U.N.
6: The Terri Schiavo Affair
5: Bush and Condi's Excellent Gaza Adventure
4: "Brownie, You're Doing a Heckuva Job"
3: Abu Ghraib*
2: 9/11
1: "Mission Accomplished"
*This particular scandal was so bad that even the John Birch Society (!!!) concluded that the administration and its flunkies were war criminals.

This would not be my list-- to be sure-- but it still is a decent stab at summing up the badness.