One has to ask, is the President practicing cognitive dissonance in his waning days in office or is the failure of reason a result of insulating oneself with partisan yes-men for eight years.
At one of President George W . Bush’s last press conferences he meandered into diatribe about the administration’s policy to ‘keep America/Americans safe’ in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. He explained that through his term in the White House, measures were enacted by the Cabinet and himself which effectively kept the homeland free from terrorist attack for seven years.
So, I ask the question in the title, is he ‘Lunatic, Liar, Legend, or Lord?’ Is he clinically insane, a sociopath, a man who has truly performed for the greater good or a savior yet to be realized?
I hold the position that the correct answer can be found in the first two choices, lunatic or liar. The President and his administration have NOT kept Americans safe. Enlisted men and women were sent to a country that was held up as threat, supported by falsified intelligence and sold to the American people via exploitation of a still raw fear lingering from the day those planes hit the buildings in mid-September 2001. More than four thousand American military personnel have died since that day, couple that with troops from the ‘coalition of the willing’ and civilian deaths and the safety President Bush speaks of comes at a cost in the hundreds of thousands. This number of deaths could easily represent the population of a small to mid-sized city, and they have been murdered in the desert to provide what amounts to a false sense of ‘security’. Iraq never posed a credible threat to the United States homeland according to numerous intelligence reports, and posed a minimal threat to U.S. interests abroad.
The deaths in the manufactured Iraq war greatly exceed those from September 11th and as a result, illustrate the Bush White House has harmed Americans and foreign civilians far more than the 19 hijackers. Either the President really believes he has kept America safe and he is a lunatic, or he knows the claim is misleading and a red-herring, therefore making him a liar.
Either way, he is certainly not a Legend or Lord.
“Your kindness for weakness I never mistook
I worried you often,yet you understood
That life is so fleeting,these troubles won’t last
Forever”
Bush is a man of integrity. I would have loved to have him in the office for eight more years so that the world would have been freed from freedom haters and man slaughter.