The Bush Era: An 'American Fiasco'

In the waning days of the Bush administration, Simon Schama wonders how the president is handling his role as the “all-time loser in presidential history.” “If the Statue of Liberty were alive,” Schama writes in the Guardian, “she would be weeping tears of blood” over Dubya’s legacy of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians, thousands of US casualties, and “mutilations” of civil liberties.

Then again, the “American fiasco” isn’t all Bush’s fault, Schama notes: He came to office at a rocky time, with a conservative ideology born decades earlier. That ideology drove his attempt to take government “out of the way of business,” a move that ended with a “bizarre” twist: “the most massive shift of financial power from the private to the public sector since the New Deal.” (More George W. Bush stories.)