I had heard that “googling” the words “miserable failure” would take one to President Bush’s official biography site. After hearing this morning that another 524,000 Americans lost their livelihood in December alone, raising the nation’s unemployment rate to 7.2 percent, and that 2.6 million Americans have lost their livelihood in 2008, making 2008 the worst year for layoffs since 1945—one of the worst in our nation’s history—I felt the uncontrollable urge to google “miserable failure.”
Apparently Google has fixed this “Google Bomb,” and one is no longer directed to Bush’s web site, but rather to thousands of other entries discussing this miserable failure in terms of “commentary, discussions and articles” about the phenomenon itself.
Then, after hearing that Bush’s Treasury Department has no idea, nor cares, how banks are spending the taxpayers’ $700 billion financial rescue package, the so-called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), I went to Yahoo and tried “miserable failure” again, and the very first entry was:
Biography of President George W. Bush
Features a biography of the 43rd president, President George W. Bush, from the White House website.
www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html – Cached
Apparently the drive to tie the phrase “miserable failure” to Bush’s biography started in 2003, when his administration was still relatively young. At that time, some may have had some reason to consider such efforts inappropriate. Today, after five additional years of truly miserable failures, culminating into millions of American families facing absolute financial ruin, I for one have no problem with such a “phenomenon.”
And neither does the U.S. media nor the foreign press, which are awash with articles decrying the Bush legacy.
One such article is the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, “De boedel van Bush is over de hele linie failliet.” The title literally translates into “Bush’s estate is bankrupt across the board,” but it can also be translated as “Bush’s legacy is bankrupt across the board,” as it is at Watching America.
Regardless of the translation, the article is critical of how Bush literally and figuratively drove our country into bankruptcy.
But, before we attack the foreign press as being “anti-American” or “Americans haters,” we should take the time to at least peruse some of these critical articles. We might be pleasantly surprised that the animosity or criticism is not directed at Americans or America, but rather at this “unique” administration that in eight short years managed to squander the tremendous amount of goodwill, respect and admiration that others, especially Europeans, have always had for America and Americans.
For example, the Handelsblad article on Bush’s legacy concludes: “America is and remains a dynamic country, but Bush’s estate is bankrupt across the board.”
Yes, we are a dynamic country and we will overcome this crisis—as we have so many other ones—and we will once more have the respect we have always been so rightly proud of.
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.