The Sins of the Son

I would have thought that finding new faults in George W Bush would by now be a somewhat tiresome game of whack-a-mole. There seems to be no depth of incompetence or mendacity that he has not plumbed. Nonetheless, Bruce Reed, writing in Slate, has some interesting turns of phrase and yet another crime to lay at Bush's feet.
Like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day," George W. Bush seems doomed to wake up every morning in the same Maureen Dowd column about a father's shadow he can darken but not escape.

Of course these columns are not much threat to a man who neither reads nor thinks. My guess is that the 1/3 or so of Americans who still believe in him mostly fit the same category.

One less often mentioned bad deed:
In perhaps the most telling rejection of Clintonism, Bush dismantled the COPS program, which had helped communities put more police on the beat and helped cut violent crime by a third nationwide. Not having enough troops turned out to be a losing strategy here at home, too. This week, the FBI announced the sharpest increase in violent crime since 1991.

Under Clinton, the nation's police forces produced the longest sustained drop in crime on record. Now many cities are becoming murder capitals again. In 2006, robbery went up 9.7% -- the fastest rise in at least the past quarter century.

Relatively speaking, of course, that's a pretty minor misdeed for the President of torture and war, the President who walked blindly into 9/11 and the Hurricane Katrina disaster and presided over one of the most corrupt American governments ever.

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