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Showing posts from January 14, 2009

Bush works on his legacy

Business Times - 15 Jan 2009 Bush works on his legacy before the curtain falls By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT IN less than a week, US President George W Bush will be leaving the White House. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Mr Bush's presidency, it seems that 79 per cent of Americans would not miss him. The latest CNN poll found that only one-third of Americans want Mr Bush to play a post-presidency role in public life. Indeed, given the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, the costly and unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina, and his pure amateurism and incompetence, it is not surprising that most Americans seem to share negative attitudes towards the man who occupied the White House for the last eight years. At the same time, historians have been harsh in their grading the Bush administration, with some of them predicting that he would be considered one of the worst - if not the w

The Rise of Declinism

You don't have to buy into nightmare scenario about the coming collapse of the USA that Russian analyst Igor Panarin has been promoting (Joel Garreau did a better job in partitioning America). But you have to take seriously historian Paul Kennedy's most recent revisiting of his declinism thesis. It makes a lot of sense to me (see for example here and here and here).