dreday

I’m no fan of Bush, but I don’t hold the sort of seething, bitter revulsion towards him that so many people around me have internalized. My beef with W is not usually focused on fundamental differences in belief, but rather on the incompetence and fumbling way in which he goes about failing everything he tries. For example, I’m all for immigration and entitlement reform, spreading democracy in the backwards middle east, renovating and renewing American military prominence, free trade, dramatically increasing aid to Africa, and the push towards an “ownership society”. I hate him not for having or supporting those ideas, but for letting his divisive politics and power hungry approach to executive leadership stand in the way of accomplishing any of them (aid to Africa aside).  My philosophical support for the Bush administration ends when it comes to social issues, however. I acknowledge that his positions on gay marriage, science, torture, abortion, and such, are undeniably loathsome. But those are things that can probably be remedied easily by the next administration, and have arguably not caused a lot of lasting personal damage to anyone (they are also things that a lot of Americans agree with Bush on, and this is, afterall, a democracy). I guess what I’m trying to say is that, yes, Bush sucks, but mostly because of his “congenital passivity”, lack of curiosity, and unabashed cronyism that leads to catastrophic failure at every attempt to accomplish something that otherwise might have been a good idea. The Economist’s assessment of the Bush years does a great job of hashing out the most legitimate criticisms of his leadership, and ignores the simple bullshit summed up nicely in those retarded bumper stickers that call Bush the “terrorist”.

In any case, we’re all glad that he’s finally gone, both for his and the country’s sake.

“Iranian officials have already denounced the station as being an agent for ‘espionage and psychological warfare’, and have warned citizens not to get involved with a ‘lie-spreading’ channel.”

Hah!

The 2009 Index of Economic Freedom

By the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. The index ranks countries on 10 different criteria ranging from trade freedom to property rights and labor freedom. Take a quick look at the list and you can quickly see the correlation between prosperity and the free market. All naysayers can look at the methodology and see that it’s pretty quantitative (read: unbiased) and takes most of its data from the World Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit (read: they’re smarter than you). Yeah I know you don’t care. Fuck off.