‘W’: Mr. Tough Guy

OK, so it was his last State of the Union speech. OK, so he wanted to have those cameras scan the floor and watch as his Republicans would stand and cheer and the Democrats sat and stared.

But over earmarks? “W” the fiscal conservative? What was he thinking? After seven years and not vetoing a single earmark and not even saying a darn thing about them! Now he is Mr. Tough Guy? Now he puts himself forth as the “cut spending president”?

“W” will win a place in the annals of history and the Guinness Book of World Records as the president who took us from the greatest surpluses in American history to the greatest deficits in less than five years.

And his beloved earmarks — 1,400 when Republicans took over the Congress to over 14,000 last year. Another lovely accomplishment for the Republicans and Bush.

He proposes budgets that a monkey could draw up with greater precision and with greater likelihood to produce a balanced accounting. The national debt has nearly doubled during his presidency — not a statistic to be proud of, certainly (from $5.3 trillion to $9.4 trillion today).

So now we have to pick up the pieces of an economy in peril, a spend and tax program out of control, a war that he doesn’t think we should pay for, and deficits that will drag the country down for as far as we can see.

This president will leave office leaving us holding the bag for one of the most incompetent and misguided examples of public policy America has ever witnessed.

Some presidents inherit bad problems, some come to them not of their own making, but in this case “W” has been wrong from the start and created the disaster that we now have to confront.

And, as you may have noticed, nothing he said in his State of the Union address, or will propose with his budget this week, will do a darn thing to solve the problems his policies caused.

A year from now, he will go waltzing out into the western sunset, letting the Democrats to pick up the pieces of an economic house in ruin and a war unresolved. What a lovely legacy for the history books.

And for that he deserves applause and is all smiles? Scary.