It's Goodbye From Him ...

In a matter of hours, George W. Bush will be rootin' and a tootin' his way into retirement, and I for one won't be sorry to see the back of him. If history is kind to Bush, it will remember him as an affable buffoon known for his famous mis-statements and amusing scrapes. But I doubt posterity will be so forgiving. The blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, and through his unstinting support for Israel, Palestinians and Lebanese, will forever stain his character. His reckless unilateral foreign policy has made America's name mud and made the world a more dangerous place. His redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich means continuing hardship for millions of American workers. Hurricane Katrina probably did more than anything exposed his indifference to those at the bottom of the heap. As the world's most prominent flat-earther climate change denier, his administration has sabotaged meaningful international cooperation on tackling the environmental crisis. Neither will history forget it was his negligence that made the debt-fuelled boom possible, which made the present economic catastrophe inevitable.

As George Dubya ponders a soft retirement on his ranch, cushioned some point down the line by his ghosted memoirs, he and his despicable cronies will not spare a single thought for the victims of their policies. Bush's presidency was the very epitome of bourgeois triumphalism, arrogance and decadence after capitalism, we were told, had finally laid Marx's spectre to rest. It is therefore pleasingly ironic that he, more than any other contemporary political figure, has done more to make the socialist critique and alternative more urgently necessary than ever.