An email response

To the question I received as to whether Smirky has done anything positive for our country, I replied:
I think I can safely say that Bush has done absolutely nothing positive for us. Let alone the fact that lying and causing war and death are immoral, his policies have done nothing but polarize this country and sell us down the river of debt, all for the enrichment of a few--"his base", most famously quoted from him. From almost definitely gaining office fraudulently and in full knowledge of the higher-ups in the Republican Party--if not their full complicity--to the retention of quite possibly the worst NSC director and Sec. of State (Rice) and Sec. of Defense (Rumsfeld) in history, Bush's regime has been one disaster after another, except for those who have gained wealth by his actions/inactions. His foreign policy has driven us to become the most hated and feared political body in the history of the world--hey, even Hitler had more allies than we do!--while his domestic fiscal policy will continue to harm generations to come due to the extraordinarily large budget and trade deficits we now face.
While the continued erosion of public and political civility can hardly be laid at his feet--just his political party and their media allies--he has only encouraged it through his divisive and duplicitous rhetoric and his disdain for comity. By bringing faith-based "reasoning" to the Oval Office, Bush has virtually made impervious any criticism of his thinking. As he stated so trenchantly and unAmericanly, "if you're not with [him], you're against him." That is not the language of a democracy, and it is in that realm that his entire being has caused the most salient damage--we are rapidly losing any semblance of democratic ideals as espoused in our Constitution and as sanctioned by over 210 years of our history. The Civil War was fought to establish our country as one where religion (among other things, obviously) would no longer control policy, since by eliminating slavery, we enabled the rise of a secular polity throughout the country. Slavery's moral support (and opposition, paradoxically enough) came mainly from religious grounds. By ridding the political sphere of slavery's divisive existence, the nation also stripped away the main reason religion had remained politically irritating, leaving us with the secular government the Founding Fathers intended us to have.
Bush's legacy will be one of rising classism, entrenching intolerance, and politicizing greed, if we are lucky enough to rebound from this era's excesses at all. His perversion and subversion of all this country believed prior to 2000 (even if after 1980 we weren't really acting on those beliefs) will be condemned by future historians as the nadir of our nation's history--previous low points did not entail the deaths of tens of thousands of foreign nationals, after all . . .