Humiliated by the Kremlin. No closer to catching Bin Laden. Saddled with the biggest debt in history. No wonder America can't wait to get rid of Bush



With just 75 days before his successor is elected, has President George W. Bush finally lost the plot? Some of the cockiness has gone out of his walk. A pleading tone has replaced the threats. Instead of issuing a High Noon threat over Russia's aggression towards its neighbours, he complains that their ' bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century'. Look who's talking!

For all Bush's bluster, Osama Bin Laden is still 'wanted dead or alive', and time has surely run out for him to be paraded down Park Avenue on a fire engine to redeem the Bush presidency. Now it's his hopeful Republican successor, Senator John McCain, who vows to hunt Bin Laden to 'the gates of Hell and beyond'.



Humiliated: Bush's time is nearly up

Having avoided being 'tainted' by association with the President, McCain is now running as Bush Mark II. And it seems to be working: he is neck and neck in the polls with black boy-wonder Barack Obama, whose professorial manner is no match for McCain's brutal candour.

Now Obama's supporters are urging the sensational: that he choose Hillary Clinton this week as his vice-presidential running mate to get women voters who feel they've been disenfranchised back on side.

As the excitement builds about this weekend's Democratic convention in mile-high Denver - will Obama and Hillary appear arm in arm, even though her husband, Bill, has been anything but warm about the candidate who came from nowhere to beat his wife? - Bush is almost a forgotten figure here.



The unthinkable: Obama is being urged to pick Hilary Clinton as his running mate

The best anyone can say about him is that he's not as bad as he used to be. That he got rid of his scary Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. That he now listens to the calm Condoleezza Rice, his Secretary of State, rather than bogeyman Vice-President Dick Cheney, who's allegedly so aggressive that, according to one comic, he 'returned fire' after hearing a 21-gun salute to some visiting foreign dignatory.

The 'Mission Accomplished' banner hung on an aircraft carrier off the Californian coast onto which Bush co-piloted a fighter jet after the invasion of Iraq is a grisly memory of presidential hubris which consumes American lives and billions of dollars five years on.

His 'war on terror' puppet in Pakistan, President Pervez Musharraf, is forced out of office. In Georgia, Russian troops withdraw at their leisure, their commanders taunting Bush and America.



Calm: Bush takes advice from Condoleeza Rice

'Coming up next: Russian troops driving our Humvees in Georgia!' announces a stricken-sounding TV newsman here, referring to American military equipment donated to the Georgians.

Although Bush & Co encouraged Georgia's reckless provocation of Russia, it was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who raced there and negotiated a ceasefire when it all went pear-shaped.

Bush then sent Condoleeza Rice, supposedly to fine-tune the agreement - i.e. pretend it was their ceasefire, not Sarkozy's - but no one paid much attention.

For the past two years, Bush's approval ratings have been below 40 per cent. Currently they're on 32 per cent. On Tuesday, The New York Times carried six letters about the Georgian crisis. Extraordinarily, all of them criticised Bush's policies.



John McCain has managed to avoid being tainted by association with Bush

Stationing missiles in Poland and encouraging bellicosity in Georgia only feed Russian paranoia and may well lead to war,' wrote one reader.

There is a real fear now that a down-and-nearly-out Bush will arrange an 'autumn surprise' military emergency which compels Americans to support their Government, i.e. the ruling Republicans, at the presidential election. It was by whipping up American fears about more terrorism in the 'homeland' (as his administration began calling the U.S.) and promising he'd be there to protect them, that draft dodging Bush beat Vietnam War hero John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

Of course, The New York Times is not Middle America, where many support the President in any circumstances. But it's hard to find anyone other than professional Bush-boosters who has a good word to say about America's clumsy manipulation of Georgia.



Mostly, the public mood is simple exhaustion with people finding themselves in a trap. Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the middle of an economic crisis, Americans don't need an embarrassing stand-off with Russia.

Where did it all go wrong for Bush? Even though he was accused of stealing the 2000 election from Democrat Al Gore, who actually won more votes - the outcome was decided by the Supreme Court - most Americans, even those who hadn't voted for him, were prepared to give 'Dubya' a chance.

A former drunk, the 'born again' George had developed a good ole boy cowboy persona and way of speaking which generally played well with them, even if it did amuse sophisticated East Coast types who knew he was really a Yale educated grandee. Besides, Gore came across as a stuffed shirt.

While terrifying, the 9/11 attacks were a gift to any U.S. President. The whole nation united behind him - as did most other nations - when Bush clambered among the World Trade Centre rubble shouting encouragement to rescue workers through a bullhorn.

Even going missing for hours after the attack - when the Secret Service decided to keep him well away from Washington - did no lasting harm to Bush. Nor did the hare-in-the-headlights expression on his face when told at a Florida school he was visiting at the time about the hijacked airplanes.

But who could have guessed any President would exploit so dastardly an attack on his people to launch a war against Iraq, which he knew had nothing whatever to do with 9/11, or its supposed mastermind Osama Bin Laden.

From the beginning of his presidency, though, it was clear Bush wanted to remake America after Bill Clinton's two-terms. As Newsweek remarks 'Bush rejected and tried to reverse everything that he could, almost as an article of faith. His decision to blindly repudiate anything associated with Bill Clinton is what got us into this mess in the first place'. The 'mess' is considerable.

Nuclear missile-owning Pakistan is 'lost' - increasing hugely the risk of even more deadly terrorism. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are surely unwinnable in any real sense of the word.

According to some estimates, Bush has added $3trillion to America's national debt, bringing it to $11trillion. He has also presided over an increase in the trade deficit from $377billion to $800billion. The government's unfunded Social Security and Medicare obligations are estimated at $54trillion.

These are fantasy figures to most Americans but what they do notice is resurgent China and Russia.

The former has hosted the most spectacular Olympics ever. Bush was there to cheer them on. The Kremlin, meanwhile, acts like its knows America can do nothing about its over-the-top aggression in Georgia. 'While America has been bogged down and bled dry, China and Russia are plumping up,' says The New York Times's Maureen Dowd, who has written about Bush since 1999.

'China has bought so much of the U.S. that we Americans would be Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires - all through our addiction to oil.'

Even such famed U.S. companies as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have had to comply with the demands of the Chinese - including censorship of the internet in order to win trade deals.

Worst of all for a nation which aspires to lead the world by example, America's law-ignoring torture of terrorist suspects, held for years at Guantanamo Bay and numerous secret foreign locations, means the U.S. has lost its honour due to Bush & Co's excesses.