Bush mildly delayed the NO rescue by not immediately firing incompetant officials (like the horse trainer who didn’t set up a command centre). Do you really think Obama’s mother would tell the American people: people living in the Superdome are doing good for themselves (I really hope Barb just meant to say: good, given the situation)?

GWB campaigned on a platform that no one would tempt the US thirst for oil. He actively has lobbied for big oil and supressed scientific discovery so badly, I’m almost willing to give the Chinese super-power model a try, for all its warts. Obama has a $150 billion ten-year enviro-trust in the planning. He has enough measured caution in his stated biofuel and nuclear platforms, that he might even avoid/divest these pyrhic “solutions”.

The US deficit is primarily a Republican tax-cut and Iraq War creation. Bush’s Iraq War added $5/barrel to oil prices and maybe he unleashed inflation or USD flight that added another $5. Not much. His corn biofuel subsidies doubled corn prices and increased most other crop prices….

I doubt B.Obama would utilize racial profiling of Arabs as much as Bush is. I say this because he has friends (such as the Reverand) who should keep him grounded from his upbringing. It would be neat to see Obama institute a law that all whites must spend a day a year in a federal prison, like “Waldon Two” or the Soviet gulag. I’d bet 1/2 (drug possession, THC distribution, consensual sex with a mid-teen, not rapes and murders) the black inmates get immediately released in the aftermath…on the downside, Hepatitas, MRSA and HIV rates among affluent free whites would rise.

I agree its more a systemic than a leadership issue. If he was so bad, he wouldn’t have won in 2004. My own belief for the CNN flip-flop, is the network realized just in 2008 it was responsible for helping to dumb-down American 2000/2004 voters, and it didn’t want to unleash a third harm on the US people. CNN is remorseful.

President Bush made statements he knew to be false with the intent of securing the consent of the American Congress for a war he chose.

Media bias is hard to measure because political leanings themselves are hard to measure. I really don’t think that the media is too biased either way you look at it. Considering the types of people who get into journalism (young fresh-out-of-college adults with a lot to say), the places where news is more likely to be covered, and other factors, I’d assume that American media as a whole, if anything, is a little left-of-center in comparison to America’s spectrum as a whole.

I don’t mean to get into a political flamewar, but this is simply not true. There was an intelligence failure. That’s not the same as the president lying. It just isn’t.

I get that you don’t like Bush’s policies, but that doesn’t make him a liar or a criminal. Bush, like virtually everyone else (including the intelligence services of countries that opposed the invasion), believed that the Hussein regime possessed stockpiles of prohibited weapons. At the time, that was an eminently reasonable belief. Learn to accept this.

So yes, he controls the executive branch, not typhoons or the economy. Let’s look at what he’s done with just his branch.

Bush filled the federal bureaucracy with incompetent timeservers, cronies, and patrons. There is a reason all the crap is hitting the fan now: in a real emergency, heckuva-job chair-wasters are not smart and they do not get things done.

Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster no one could control. FEMA was a human disaster controlled by a doofus. Bush was mugging for the cameras with McCain and country western stars when the water hit the top of the levees.

Bush replaced US attorneys on politically sensitive investigations, at the behest of his political team. Alberto Gonzales took the fall for the President, but the current AG is refusing to file contempt charges handed over by Congress for Rove and Miers.

He restarted TIA in defiance of a law that declared it illegal, recreating a vast information-sucking operation. This goes hand in hand with his defiance of FISA, a quite explicit law forbidding the wiretapping of Americans without particularized warrants. He told the NSA to start sucking up call data and Internet traffic indiscriminately, and he did so repeatedly. Even now he and his supporters in Congress are trying lamely to shut down lawsuits by EFF, ACLU, and others to get to the bottom of things.

There is a very real trail of evidence that Bush couldn’t have cared less about whether Iraq, but was determined to invade from early in his presidency. See, eg, the Paul O’Neill book by Ron Suskind. He bent the national security apparatus to his will to do so, then lied in public about the evidence to go to war.

The so-called liberal media (see mediamatters.org for another side of the story) has been his pliant co-conspirator, with the exception of some ignored voices out on the fringes.

The list actually goes on. So to answer your question, I hardly know whether the media will make excuses for the ups and downs of an Obama presidency. But there is plenty to lay at the feet of an active and malevolent presidency, including the elephant in the room, detainee treatment, Abu Ghraib, and torture.

[Brown] warned Bush there were problems, but was ignored.

You can defend Brown by saying Bush ignored him, but that hardly supports your original contention that Bush had little control over the outcome.

if they had been super competent they might have fixed [the major problem], namely the crummy shape of the levees in New Orleans, a problem that had been publicly known and reported on for a long time.

Since the problem was so well known, I’d say that ordinary competence ought to have sufficed.

Let’s not get lost in the weeds, though. My main point is that modern presidents past, present and future may not have a lot of direct control over the particular outcomes, but do exercise a great deal of influence just by picking who runs what. The corollary is that it is fair to hold a president responsible for his staffing picks.

but a massive correlated group of people is a collective failure and it can only sensibly be blamed on collective or institutional action (or some charismatic leader).

That’s a remarkable statement. If I approach a single stupid and greedy person with a get-rich-quick offer, and they accept, they are responsible for making a bad choice. But if I approach a group of stupid and greedy people individually, and each accepts the offer, there is now a collective action responsible for their choices? Even though their choices were made independently?

How exactly do you intend to prevent legally competent adults from entering into contractual obligations that will likely hurt them, since they cannot be considered capable of being responsible for their own actions? Being responsible for their own actions is what being ‘legally competent’ means.