What Lies Beneath

“What Lies Beneath”

We all know many of the disasters that have occurred here at home and around the world during the seven plus years of the Bush administration. The list is too long and frankly, too boring to enunciate. But what will the next President inherit when he or she takes office on January 20, 2009? Here are a few of the probable answers. We will still be mired in Iraq with over 125,000 troops engaged there. Afghanistan will be overrun by the Taliban and the U.S. will need to send an additional 100,000 troops there. The levies in New Orleans will not be repaired nor will the residents of the Gulf Coast be any closer to having their lives restored. Oil will cost over $100.00 a barrel and gasoline will retail for between $4.00 and $5.00 a gallon. Our national debt, with the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan included, will be over three trillion dollars. The Polar Ice Cap and the Greenland Ice Shelf will have melted by another two to three percent.

But like every failed leader, George W. Bush will leave behind dark and dirty secrets, things too disgusting or horrible to mention. We may learn that Bush cut a deal with China to allow them to send us toxic products and not to boycott the summer games in Beijing, and in return the Chinese agreed to keep loaning us billions to finance Bush’s blood lust for war and nation building. We could find out that Bush vetoed S-Chip because the tobacco companies put billions into the President’s blind trust. Perhaps we will discover that Dick Cheney was the J. Edgar Hoover of the Bush administration, and had a classified “dirty secrets” file on key Congressional members which he used to persuade them not to challenge the President on war, energy and immigration issues.

Whatever we learn it is all but certain that when the story of the Bush presidency is written, it will be one of the darkest chapters in our history. It will take an almost super-human effort to clean up the Bush mess and restore America’s dignity and leadership around the world.

By:

Henry A. Lowenstein