Spring Break
President Bush leaves a dark legacy
Furrah Qureshi
Issue date: 1/16/09 Section: Ed-Op
When the country says goodbye to the 43rd president, they will not be parting with just any president - this transition is not like the last. We are on the cusp of true and actual change.
The past eight years have been indicative of a sleeping nation, a nation that chose to ignore the issues instead of confronting the truth. We have gone from having a surplus to an $11.3 trillion deficit. Unemployment, homelessness and foreclosure rates have soared higher as conditions in public schools and urban slums have dropped lower. There has been eight years of ignoring the impending social security crisis as the baby boomers edge towards the age of retirement. The areas affected by Hurricane Katrina to this day remain impoverished and unrestored. The Iraq war's final cost is still not certain, because the final day is still not certain. The economy is in shambles as students fear graduation and a job market they will be locked out of. Our parents quietly accept larger and larger workloads as they fearfully watch the desks surrounding them empty out. Oil prices have loop-de-looped from over four dollars to under three while we are still far from what they call fuel efficiency and "oil self-sufficiency."
The Bush administration had scandal upon scandal in a fashion I can't recall since Warren G. Harding. In the past eight years, our vice president has had a stake in Halliburton, an oil company; CIA agent Valerie Plame was outed, which endangered her life as well as the lives of all of her associates, because her husband wrote an article criticizing the government; Alberto Gonzalez was accused of the unsubstantiated dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys.
In December 2003, St. Petersburg Times writer Susan Taylor Martin interviewed Janis Karpinski, then-commander of U.S. prison operations in Iraq: "During Hussein's day, it was not a corrections system but one of 'intimidation and torture.' ... At Abu Ghraib, the most notorious prison, 150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24. The torture chamber was next to the hanging chamber, whose clanging iron trap doors were a vivid reminder of the fate awaiting those who refused to pledge loyalty to the regime." By 2004, it would come out that U.S. soldiers took a page out of Saddam's book in their treatment of prisoners.
The past eight years have been indicative of a sleeping nation, a nation that chose to ignore the issues instead of confronting the truth. We have gone from having a surplus to an $11.3 trillion deficit. Unemployment, homelessness and foreclosure rates have soared higher as conditions in public schools and urban slums have dropped lower. There has been eight years of ignoring the impending social security crisis as the baby boomers edge towards the age of retirement. The areas affected by Hurricane Katrina to this day remain impoverished and unrestored. The Iraq war's final cost is still not certain, because the final day is still not certain. The economy is in shambles as students fear graduation and a job market they will be locked out of. Our parents quietly accept larger and larger workloads as they fearfully watch the desks surrounding them empty out. Oil prices have loop-de-looped from over four dollars to under three while we are still far from what they call fuel efficiency and "oil self-sufficiency."
The Bush administration had scandal upon scandal in a fashion I can't recall since Warren G. Harding. In the past eight years, our vice president has had a stake in Halliburton, an oil company; CIA agent Valerie Plame was outed, which endangered her life as well as the lives of all of her associates, because her husband wrote an article criticizing the government; Alberto Gonzalez was accused of the unsubstantiated dismissal of seven U.S. attorneys.
In December 2003, St. Petersburg Times writer Susan Taylor Martin interviewed Janis Karpinski, then-commander of U.S. prison operations in Iraq: "During Hussein's day, it was not a corrections system but one of 'intimidation and torture.' ... At Abu Ghraib, the most notorious prison, 150 inmates were crammed into cells designed for 24. The torture chamber was next to the hanging chamber, whose clanging iron trap doors were a vivid reminder of the fate awaiting those who refused to pledge loyalty to the regime." By 2004, it would come out that U.S. soldiers took a page out of Saddam's book in their treatment of prisoners.
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