The Damage

Salon has a great article quantifying the damage done by the Smirky/Darth maladministration.

After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy -- foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial -- starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay.

To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.

The numbers - on Iraq, the economy, Katrina, the environment, the military - start in the billions and rapidly reach the trillions.

Those are numbers literally beyond human comprehension. The article's devastating specifics, however, serve as both a weapon against revisionist history that paints Dubya as a success, and a tool in the current debate over the economic stimulus bill.

Read it and use it.