Ward on Words

The man reluctant to cut his vacation short to help Katrina victims is working with Bill Clinton to help Haitian earthquake victims? Is this a dream or the transformation of George W. Bush into a philanthropist? From a story in the Washington Post : "Bush said that his heart, and that of former first lady Laura Bush, 'are broken when we see the scenes of little children struggling without a mom or a dad or the bodies in the streets.' He pledged to work alongside Clinton to encourage Americans to dig into their pockets. In the near term, he urged people to avoid donating blankets or other items but to just 'give your cash' to aid organizations that can spend it wisely. (Just had a flashback to those pallets filled with $12 billion in cash that vanished in Iraq in 2003 - 2004. Is Halliburton involved in anyway with the relief effort?) Strange that a man who failed to mobilize the FEMA forces during the worst natural disaster to hit America has found himse...

On Tuesday, Barack Obama, a man with a reputation as a master of words and rhetoric and the art of oration, will become the next president of the United States of America. His words at the 2004 Democratic Convention - "there is not a Black America and a White America...there is the United States of America"– catapulted him into the national spotlight. His speech on race will be studied for years to come, and his Inaugural Address is highly anticipated. George W. Bush, the man who now exits center stage, was never known to be a master with words; in fact, it was just less than a month ago that Karl Rove alerted Wall Street Journal readers that Bush actually enjoyed the act of reading – especially when a contest was involved. But as we say goodbye to the 43rd president, we have to acknowledge that, like every effective leader, he understood the power words have to influence, to persuade, to shape the actions of people. So here is an examination of some of the influen...

"Economy Made Few gains in Bush Years" is a headline from today's Washington Post. According to the story by Neil Irwin and Dan Eggan, the nation's first president with an MBA (from Harvard, to boot!) "has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades." The story is filled with gloomy statements that define the Bush era as "as a time of little progress on the nation's thorniest fiscal challenges," and as a period that showed "...the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago." The Bush team, with characteristic bravado, claimed pride in their economic accomplishments. Here's what Edward P. Lazear, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, is quoted in the article as having recently said: "It does look like a great eight years, aside from the last quarter, unfortunately. In the long term, things look good. The reason things look good...

"History takes a long time for us to reach," said George Bush nearly a year ago on a Fox News program. He was referring to the fact that in his mind, there is no way to predict how history will judge his place among presidents. However, historians have already begun the journey to place this president within the context of history. And today's judgement of Bush's place in history is not good. According an " unscientific poll of professional historians ," more than 98 percent of historians polled view the Bush presidency as a failure. And more than 61 percent view Bush as the worst president in the nation's history. Bush likes to point to Truman as why he hopes for a more positive place in history. Truman is, after all, the president who is now known to be not nearly as bad as we thought when he left office. And Bush is right; we have no idea how history will regard the president who turned a budget surplus into an astronomical deficit, who ...