I don't agree with many of the author's conclusions from the article, but his general commentary on Bush and his AIDS program in Africa is very interesting nonetheless.
Quote:But Bush also created PEPFAR: the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. PEPFAR is one of the best government programs in American history, probably the best since the Great Society. Public health research has found it saved the lives of at least a million people, and has done so with shocking cost-effectiveness...
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/8/8894019/geor...ush-pepfar
Bush did many, many, many awful things while in office, putting him among the worst presidents in US history imo. However, the point of the thread is not to suggest that Bush was a good president, a decent one, or even a mediocre one. In my personal opinion, he was bad (as I said in the OP), among the worst of all time. But PEPFAR just goes to show how a blind squirrel can find a nut every now and then, and that applies to almost every president (i.e. Obama and Cuba). On PEPFAR itself, I'm a firm opponent of foreign aid on principle, but when a president's direct actions result in the literal saving of millions of lives, there's a point where you concede that it's more than worth than its relatively small cost for the sake of humanitarianism. Even opponents of him, like me and many of you, can hopefully at least appreciate that. Does it outweigh everything else like the author suggests? He!! no, but it's nice to see some long-term good (among other minor feats) come out of his time in office.
On the topic of Bush as a whole, he never struck me as an "evil" guy. I just see him as a relatively simple man who unfortunately won the most important job in the world because he came off as earnest enough (he's always legitimately struck me as a nice guy) during a tranquil era to hold off a candidate in Gore who came across as a total snob. That was kinda like giving a chimp a machine gun, and 9/11 was a rock thrown at his head that set him off. From there I think his actions, from the wars to the Patriot Act to the idiotic counter-measures for the recession, were ruled by fear, and he let his guard down. He trusted the wrong people (i.e. Cheney, who I legitimately think is a very, very bad person) because he thought they knew what they were doing, and they went and steered his power towards 'achieving' some of what they wanted done. Honestly, I think if you insert Bush into office during the relatively uneventful Clinton years he would've been somewhat harmless; not good but not the absolute train wreck he turned out to be.
