If it does improve it shouldn't, he really is a bottom fiver. First off, I've never really understood why so-called fiscal conservatives are trying to get his reputation to improve. If you want to go forward on a platform of fiscal conservency fine, but why in the hell would you be fighting to improve the image of a man who let lapse a provision that required all new spending to be accounted for in the budget with either a tax increase or budget cut elsewhere and who spearheaded two new wars and medicare part D without finding funding for them? I find it suprememly ironic that people who are trying to crucify Obama for his role in health care legislation that actually changes the way the system operates are trying to resurrect Bush's reputation even though that man expanded socialized medicine in a way that did nothing but give more money to drug companies.
I also think that as time goes on people start to lose perspective on certain issues, things that once outraged people seem less important now because they are so distant. Doesn't change the fact that they happened and doesn't make them any less important. Let's go down the list: He started an illegal war under false pretenses that has cost countless lives of both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians; he was advised that the war would cost far more than people were estimating and when he was advised so he threw advisors out of his close circle until he got ones that told him what he wanted to hear; he appointed a bunch of cronies of his to high positions in his administration including Donald Rumsfeld (Who decided to supply the troops in the ill-conceived war with sub-par equipment), Dick Cheney (who took more liberties with his position than were intended and benefitted greatly from contracting his former company out to do work in Iraq; and Alberto Gonzales (Who did fine work undermining basic rights of citizens). Anyone saying the blame really goes to people like this, it goes just as much to Bush for putting them in positions of power and sitting by while they used their positions to benefit themselves and their agenda; He spearheaded the Patriot Act, the biggest repeal of basic American rights ever; He broke international law on torture and authorized the use of illegal practices; He gave intelligence officials free reign in places like Guantanamo and Abu-Graihb and turned a blind eye to what they were doing; He made campaign promises of climate reform and then went back on that, appointing fossil fuel industry lobbyists to key energey positions; He had key bungles during crisis moments like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and response to the latter was disastrous at best; He enacted fiscal policy that was politically savvy at the time but damaging in the long run (unnecessary tax cuts, medicare part D), not to mention spearheaded deregulation that the guru of conservative economics over the past 20 years, Alan Greenspan, admitted helped lead to the financial crisis.
As for Iraq, if you think it's getting better than you're not really paying attention. Violence there is getting worse by the day, attacks are on the rise, and their democracy is shaky at best. The region has been a contentious one for a very long time, we can't just show up, snap our fingers, and make everything all better. As soon as we dial down troops, violence kicks back up. That's the way it's going to be, peace doesn't just come overnight. Even if it does turn out to be a success, that doesn't speak to the benefit of Bush at all. It didn't start to become a success until after he left office, and even if we are able to salvage the situation that he left us that still doesn't justify our being there in the first place when we had no right to be. He still instigated a war under false pretenses, he still benefitted greatly from that war, and that is still a slight to him and his policy during office.
As for comparing him to Obama, that's a faulty line of reasoning to begin with, as using that reasoning will mean that only the current president will be subject to criticism over excessive spending, the previous president will be exonerated based on the increased spending of his successor. I guess really we shouldn't be going after Obama, we should be going after whoever succeeds him as President. Furthermore, Bush inherited economic prosperity and he decided to decrease taxes for the top income earners in this country despite the need for that revenue source to support his agenda. Obama has inherited the Bush tax rate, which hopefully he will raise to a reasonable level, he has inherited two expensive wars, and he has inherited the largest projections for medicare and medicaid spending ever. The difference is that Bush didn't have to spend money, he could have kept taxes where they were or decreased the scale of his own plans for spending. Obama had to spend money to resuscitate a dying economy, kickstart projects that would put people back to work and build new eco-friendly energy systems for our country, fix a health system that would not only cost Americans more and more as time went on but would cost teh government exponentially more, and ensure that institutions that employed countless middle-cla$$ Americans didn't go out of business so that the tailspin the economy was in at the time didn't get that much worse. Obama was backed into a corner when it came to spending, Bush wasn't, that was the difference.
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