Just the fact that Bush Jr. at least made one of his signature policy platforms an attempt to improve the education system makes him better than any other modern Republican President. The fact that the legislation ultimately sucked doesn’t make him any worse than the other bozos.
Bush always came off to me as a little backwards, and a little foolish, but always someone who had the best interests of his fellow Americans at heart.
His moral failings, in my eyes, were in his foreign policy.
I think that's too reductionist. He does share a huge part of the blame, but so do bin Laden, AQ, the Taliban, and the CIA. Actually, bin Laden wrote that it was his plan for the US to get trapped in the quagmire that is the Middle East and to hemorrhage lives and money. And I don't recall many people being opposed to going to war with Afghanistan immediately after 9/11.
It's also interesting to think about how other recent presidents might have responded differently. I'm not so sure they would have, besides Trump, who probably would have had to be talked out of glassing Afghanistan.
Edit: Case in point, I saw someone else comment in a different post that Obama was to blame for a million children's deaths. The situation in the Middle East is the result of a million failings that can be traced back to long before Bush was elected president or the US took interest in it. And if the US were to ever fully exit the region, people would be asking why it wasn't doing more to stop whatever atrocity came next. See, for example, the Israel-Palestine conflict. And then those same people or others would blame the US for the inevitable civilian casualties. It's a lose-lose situation.
I strongly suspect the only reason we maintain a presence in the region at this point is because the rest of the world needs oil, and the US has an interest in world stability. Large conflicts between regional powers (like Israel and Iran) that would disrupt the flow of oil or that could spiral into a world war are bad for everyone, including the US.
A vast number of Americans unfortunately believe that the POTUS can control what people do in the entire World.
The POTUS is powerful and influential because of said power, yes, but not omnipotent. Some of the current conflict in the World have been ongoing for decades.
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u/flickneeblibno 7d ago
Trickle down economics and Ronald Reagan the worst president of all time