If You Had One Word To Describe George W. Bush

There really are far too many adjectives with negative connotations to describe our outgoing President. So many come to mind, even the ones without expletives attached. But if you had to choose just one, which would it be? Well Pew did a survey of people four years ago and another just recently to see how Americans' view of the President has changed and there is one word that truly does sum up his Presidency that got remarkable movement in between the polls.

From Pew Research:

Meanwhile, concerns about Bush's effectiveness are also seen in the one-word answers people give to describe their impressions of the president. In mid-2005, positive one-word descriptions outnumbered negative ones, but in more recent lists, the responses have been more negative. The most frequently mentioned description in the latest survey was "incompetent," just as it was in February 2007 and March 2006. Many of the terms offered by respondents in the December 2008 survey are negative, though the second most frequently mentioned description was honest. Good and honorable also make the list.


George Bush will definitely go down as one of the most incompetent Presidents of all time, without a doubt. Of course, he's also a selfish,idiotic, ignorant, stupid, arrogant ass as well.

Bush's Mismanaged FDA Endangers Our Health

dConservatives claim today that George Bush isn't really one of their own because the country has fallen so precipitously in so many regards. However, Bush does govern as a conservative and a radical one at that. Giving the government's responsibility to protect the people over to private industry has happened more rapidly in the last eight years than Reaganomics could hope for in the 1980s. Back then it was about giving back taxes to the wealthy and away from the programs to help the poor.

Now in 2008 the reforms of the 1930s and the progressive movement as a whole are under full-frontal assault. There are plenty of examples of this, the defense industry, airline safety and energy regulation to name a few. Every single sector of de-regulation is a serious national matter, but when it comes to the food we eat most Americans assume that the FDA and the USDA are looking out for our safety, but they'd be wrong. It isn't because the inspectors don't care, the reason is that there just aren't enough of them.

From US News:

From the first reports of a salmonella outbreak this spring, it took a full 89 days before jalapeño and serrano peppers correctly came under suspicion as the culprit. During that period, as more than 1,440 victims trickled in to hospitals, federal officials struggled to trace the source of the outbreak, erroneously singling out tomatoes for weeks before homing in on peppers. No sooner had that outbreak tapered off than the high-end Whole Foods Market was forced to launch a massive recall of E. coli-infested ground beef.

The incidents prompted renewed calls for reform and stricter oversight of food safety. Some lawmakers are even suggesting stripping the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture of their inspection duties and giving them to a new agency. Yet the FDA in particular has long been starved of funding and understaffed. Its workload, meanwhile, is rapidly expanding as the global food chain grows larger, more complicated, and less transparent, all of which adds to the agency's already overcrowded plate.

Congress is under pressure to take up major food-safety legislation this fall that would offer sweeping proposals for regulatory change. The country's appetite for reform, however, is likely to collide with an uncomfortable reality: The responsibility for food safety, as it works today, lies heavily in private hands. Even as bacterial outbreaks have become more high-profile and the financial fallout from recalls more severe, the government has been handing off many food-safety responsibilities to industry. Food safety today is a business—and a booming one at that.

Now strict economic conservatives should deem this a good thing. Less government regulation means that private industry will step in and help keep our food safe. The problem is that like most of conservative ideology, the market doesn't care about our safety, it only cares about one thing, profit.

The counter-argument is that you can only profit if you keep selling food and that food has to be safe in order for people to buy it. Not so fast though, the evidence in the last few years has shown that these agribusiness giants have taken plenty of missteps at our expense and when people get sick (and some that die) the FDA is used as a scapegoat, but the real problem lays at the feet of the conservative policies in the last eight years and back during the eighties that helped to cripple the agency.

The market only cares about how to stay profitable and like the article states, retailers pay for inspections for crops that have had problems beforehand, not potential problems in the future. Here's an example. Say squash had a 0.01 percent chance of becoming diseased and that disease would kill 40 percent of the people that ate it. Meanwhile, spinach has a twenty percent chance of becoming infected but only harming ten percent of those that ate it and wasn't fatal. Retailers will spend the money on the spinach inspection because of the higher chance for an outbreak and not on the squash because ultimately the market deals looks at risk in the same manner as insurance companies set rates for clients. It always comes back to the profit motive, not the human-safety motive.

Now government regulation backed up by a strong budget to enforce it doesn't just go after past problems, it looks for all problems. The government is in place for the people (theoretically) and must respond to their wishes. Collectively we want our food to be safe, not just particular problem spots here and there around the farm. That is why Congress shouldn't go off and create a new agency, they should stick to the one they've got and make it effective again.

Seven Years Later It Is Time To Make A Choice

Seven years ago today my Mom called me early in the morning. I was living in Tucson at the time and she was home in Los Angeles. Calls that came before seven always scared me from her, because the ring usually foretold bad news. This time though, she told me to turn on the television and she was crying. Needless to say, I watched the news all day long, sometimes with friends but mostly by myself. I just couldn't believe what I saw on television. The horrific nature of it all was overwhelming and to a degree hard to fathom far away from Ground Zero at the edge of the Sonoran Desert. Then I watched what our President and his minions did with our national tragedy and global goodwill. Now look at where we are.

This morning I am sitting in City Hall Park, a few stops on the 6 train from where I have been living for nearly three years. It is relatively quiet in here save for the beautiful fountain that graces the center of the park. Every few minutes a fire truck passes by, no doubt on its way to the memorial for those that lost their lives just a few blocks from here.

When I lived two thousand miles away I saw New York through a tourist's eyes and marveled at the city but I was too busy with Tucsonan politics to deal or even have much interest in the minutae of the vast web that NYC politicians and bureaucrats weave over and around the city. I have gotten to know some of it since I moved here and while parts are good, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed. The Deutsche Bank still stands as a stark reminder that corruption and incompetence has played a major role in the clean up of the area. Hundreds of FDNY firefighters lost their lives because of the terrorists, but last year another two died because of substandard conditions and negligence by FDNY's very own inspectors. That just isn't right, yet even after that tragedy last August, problems still remain. Seven years later, we must not only remember, but take action as well.

While New York must take care of the clean up and reconstruction of the area, our Federal government must act to make sure we prevent future attacks and not only seek out the terrorists that helped commit that heinous act, but stop giving them reasons to recruit more from wanting to do us harm.

This year we must make a choice between two men that want to take our country in two different directions. To decide, we must not only look at "experience" but more importantly we must examine their judgment. Shortly after the buildings collapsed, John McCain called for war with Iraq. George Bush gave him that wish and simultaneously kissed our international cooperation goodbye.

When the propaganda was spread by the right that we must invade Iraq (under false pretenses) few spoke out against them. The traditional media happily beat the war drum for the Republican-dominated government. One of those few though, was Barack Obama. He was against the war from before we started it and he is still against it and most importantly wants to end it. There is no difference more clear between him and McCain. One wants to get out as quickly as possible and the other wants to stay there for a hundred years.

So as I sit here in park, enjoying the people, the landscaping and the array of buildings that surround me, I realize that my view has changed in seven years. Not that I was for the war and now I'm against it...I've always been against the war and was part of the ten percent that disapproved of George Bush immediately following the attacks. No, what has changed is my perspective because of my location. As a relatively new New Yorker, I see what needs to be changed here in the city and what needs to get done, but I could tell you from anywhere in the world that we can not have four or eight more years of the same destructive policies that George Bush has used to run our nation into the ground.

Bush Now Protects Personal Privacy....Of Tomatoes

A brilliant headline just in from Effect Measure on the status of the salmonella outbreak that had broken out on the national media stage and then disappeared. George Bush doesn't care about the privacy of Americans (except for those at telecom companies) but he does empathize with the infected tomato crop.

From Effect Measure:

The FDA and CDC still don't know the origin of the massive Salmonella outbreak, now extending to 40 states. They have lots of reasons, and under current conditions it's not an easy problem since the production channels for things like tomatoes are labyrinthine. There's lots of mixing, matching, diverting, and who knows what else going on as a tomato goes from a farm or hothouse to your table or local salad bar. We know this because FDA and CDC have been telling us so as explanation for why they still don't know where a single clone of Salmnella saintpaul has managed to infect almost 1000 people so far with no end in sight. You'd think that FDA and CDC would be anxious to make that job easier. Of course you'd be wrong:

Fruit and vegetable producers should be required to use technology allowing U.S. regulators to trace origins of contaminated produce such as tomatoes, considered the probable cause of a current outbreak, consumer groups said.

Failure to identify the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened at least 922 Americans since mid-April shows why ``emergency regulations'' are needed to put in place new food- safety rules, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Consumer Federation of America said today in a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach.

[snip]

Growers should be required to mark fruits and vegetables with bar codes on stickers so they can be traced back to the farm of origin, the consumer groups said. Similar programs are now used voluntarily by some restaurants and retailers, and a standard code on all FDA-regulated items would improve record- keeping and speed investigations, they said.

[snip]

Producers, packers, and processors should also be required to identify in writing gaps where contamination may occur in their operations and how to prevent it, the groups urged.

Kimberly Rawlings, a spokeswoman for the FDA, said she couldn't immediately comment on the groups' proposal.

The agency has favored voluntary guidelines over mandatory rules for food producers, even though certain producer organizations have backed tougher standards to improve consumer confidence in food products. (Catherine Larkin, Bloomberg)

So basically, to keep an anti-regulatory stance in the White House and it's agencies, they refuse to do everything in their power to look for the source of the outbreak. Voluntary rules will just not cut it. Agri-business does not want to wipe out anymore of their crops and they certainly won't regulate themselves. Believing that is worse than a forty year old waiting for Santa and the Easter bunny.

There are so many testaments to the complete and utter failure of the Bush Administration. This episode certainly ranks up there with the rest of the failing grades that George has "earned" in the last seven and half years.

Even Robert Novak Sees It

Except for a few historical glitches, the President's party has supported him through thick and thin, scandals and errant policy decisions be damned. However under President Bush, not even this tenet of party politics can hold itself together. Granted, Republicans stood blindly behind George for nearly six years. They were behind him at the precipice of his popularity when he wanted to dismantle Social Security, continue the wretched war in Iraq into 2, 3, 4 and now the beginning of the fifth year. Unfortunately not even the conservatives can stand their President anymore.

Robert Novak, ardent conservative supporter and 'journalist' weighs in:

Republicans in Congress do not trust their president to protect them. That alone is sufficient reason to withhold statements of support for Gonzales, because such a gesture could be quickly followed by his resignation under pressure. Rep. Adam Putnam (Fla.), the highly regarded young chairman of the House Republican Conference, praised Donald Rumsfeld in November only to see him sacked shortly thereafter.

But not many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."

(snip)

Regarding Libby and Gonzales, unofficial word from the White House is not reassuring. One credible source says the president will never -- not even on the way out of office in January 2009 -- pardon Libby. Another equally good source says the president will never ask Gonzales to resign. That exactly reverses the prevailing Republican opinion in Congress. Bush is alone.

Well, Bush isn't alone yet. He is trying ever so hard to keep his loyalists as close to him as possible. He selected them for loyality and obviously not for competent governing. As the examples of incompetence increase seemingly day by day, Bush is holding onto his sinking ship of men, blind to the fact that his ship is full of gaping holes. In the end, he will find himself in the open sea, with his growing chorus of critics hastening his demise (though probably not before January of 2009). No matter when he goes out, he will be seen as the worst President to ever have tried to preside over the course of the United States.