Free Republic

There's actually a lot that President-elect Barack Obama can learn from the troubled presidency of George W. Bush. Over the past eight years, I have interviewed President Bush for nearly 11 hours, spent hundreds of hours with his administration's key players and reviewed thousands of pages of documents and notes. That produced four books, totaling 1,727 pages, that amount to a very long case study in presidential decision-making, and there are plenty of morals to the story. Presidents live in the unfinished business of their predecessors, and Bush casts a giant shadow on the Obama presidency: two incomplete wars and...

One hundred nine historians already nearly unanimously agree. They call the presidency of George W. Bush a "failure." The History News Network (HNN), who polled the historians, failed to name them or where they work. Wonder why? American Enterprise magazine, in 2002, examined voter registrations to determine the political affiliations of humanities professors at an assortment of colleges and universities, public and private, big and small, located in the North, South, East and West. Of those registered with a political party -- and most were -- historians overwhelmingly belong to a "party of the left" (Democratic, Green or Working Families...

Listening to Glenn this morning, he notes he is done with GWB especially after he goes to the hill on immigration reform and not for troop funding. But he also notes a contact within the White-house has said they are so done with talk radio. I guess that leaves, FR conservatives, and talk radio listeners on their own. Sounds like the RNC has divorced us.

WASHINGTON -- It's August in Crawford, Texas, and President Bush is on vacation. His poll ratings are slumping. He hears warnings of a looming crisis that will soon change the course of his presidency. Is this August 2001? Or August 2005? The answer is both. Historians will ultimately judge Bush's presidency based on his leadership through two tragedies — the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, plus a conflict of his own design: The war in Iraq. Katrina's lethal aftermath revealed that the Bush administration didn't learn valuable lessons from the 2001 attacks about responding to disasters. As for...