2001: Bush/Cheney inaugurated. Arsenic in the water. Chandra Levy. Sept. 11. Anthrax attacks. Patriot Act. War begins in Afghanistan.
2002: Axis-of-Evil speech. No Child Left Behind signed into law. Coup against Hugo Chavez fails. Color-coordinated terror charts are introduced. Bush brings case against Iraq to the UN. Washington DC sniper. Congress passes Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq. Republicans retake the Senate.
2003: Colin Powell presents case against Iraq to UN. Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates on reentry. The Coalition of the Willing invades Iraq. Bush gives Mission Accomplished speech. Bob Novak exposes Valerie Plame. Iraq insurgency begins. Deaniacs rally against the war. Michael Jackson arrested on new molestation charges.
2004: March 11 Madrid Bombings. Major NATO/EU expansion. Blackwater mutilations. Abu Ghraib. Iraqi Interim Government created. 9/11 Commission Report published. Rathergate. Red Sox break The Curse. Bush/Cheney reelected. Asian Tsunami.
2005: Rafik Hariri assassinated in Lebanon. Pope John Paul II dies. Bush attempts to privatize Social Security. Mark Felt exposed as ‘Deep Throat’. The Terri Schiavo affair. Hurricane Katrina. John Roberts confirmed on Supreme Court. Ariel Sharon has debilitating stroke.
2006: Hamas wins parliamentary elections. Samuel Alito confirmed on the Supreme Court. Al Askari Mosque is bombed, setting off the worst of the Iraq Insurgency. The alleged terrorist Zarqawi is retired. Israel invades Lebanon. Democrats retake House and Senate. Saddam Hussein executed.
2007: Nancy Pelosi becomes first female Speaker of the House. Virginia Tech massacre. Impeachment is ‘off the table’. Minneapolis bridge collapse. Benazir Bhutto assassinated.
2008: Fidel Castro resigns. Pervez Musharraf is deposed. Congress grants retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. 2008 South Ossetia war. Barack Obama elected. O.J. finally goes to prison.
Fill in the blanks if you want. Personally, my worst year of the Bush administration was 2002. But looking at events from 2004, it’s hard to argue against it. And 2001 was almost as bad as it gets. What say you?
I would take it back a year and then order it thus:
2000 – BushCo steals presidency; SCOTUS approves
2001 – 9/11 gives purpose and power to an empty suit in the oval office
2004 – nomination of Kerry guarantees 4 more years of Bush
2005 – Katrina
2006 – Jena 6
2002 – troops deployed on Bush’s Misadventure in Mesopotamia
2003 – fait accompli accomplished with Shock & Awe
2007 – Lieberman holds Senate Democrats hostage
2008 – Kwame’s text messages
Good additions, Oscar.
A lost decade is the most appropriate description of 2000 to 2009. I think Katrina was the worst moment in the last 9 years. When an American President is so incompetent to help and protect its own citizen from a natural disaster that was known at least 3 days in Advance. Where Wal-Mart, provides more relief NOL residents then FEMA or the Military. Katrina Provided us an insight to the total arrogance of incompetence in the White House Leadership.
Let’s not laud Walmart when they sell products made from child (slave) labor.
I didn’t read that as lauding Walmart. It sounded to me more like irony that Walmart, of all things, did more for the victims of Katrina than their own government did.
2005 with Katrina and the abysmal Terri Schiavo disaster were key low points for me. The disastrous mishandling of those events by the right wing machine will never be erased from my memory. Both were epic examples of the Republican dismantling of humanity.
i agree with the first poster – the worst year was 2000 – been downhill ever since. almost straight down. the past 8 years have been a living gd nightmare. and when today’s children look back at the now MISSED OPPORTUNITIES they will kill us all right where we stand or in our sleep.
‘why didn’t any of you rise up and fight the stolen election of 2000 that led this nation right off the rails, through the ditch, across the field and into the outhouse?’
‘baaaahhhhhhhhhhhh we were sheeple.’
i just sit here and stare off into space and think of the 8 wasted years and all that could have been done and think of that talking heads line: ‘mein gott what have we done?’
you sleep standing up?
Let’s focus on the positive.
2008. The end of a morally bankrupt party. Even if it took the bankrupting of the nation to do it.
I don’t know which one was objectively the worst, but my personal low point came in 2004 when Bush / Cheney were re-elected. I really questioned if I still belonged in this country or if it had changed into something I could no longer be a part of.
I agree with you. And for me it was based less on the fact that Bush was president for four more years than on the fact that enough of the people of the United States were stupid enough to allow it to happen.
At my work the shock and depression were palpable. We were in a state of stunned disbelief for quite some time. At that time I was talking to people all over the country on a daily basis. They told me that the people who had voted for Bush were keeping a very low profile and walking on eggshells as if they knew they had done something wrong.
I am not a fan of any political party, and have never been a supporter of either Obama or Hillary Clinton, but I was terrified that it would happen again, and this time, with the the Republicans playing the incredibly bad joke of Sarah Palin, it would have been worse than Bush.
2004 – they got it right in the UK.
2003, invading Iraq. That’s the moment when we lost the world and our Constitution became extinct.
My runner up: 2004, when the world was sentenced to another four years of GWB.
OT: I’ve been listening to Air America and other call in shows. So many of the callers end their questions or comments with “I don’t know what to do.” It makes me want to cry.
I hope Barack is able to change the momentum, but I’m with Digby on the apprehension scale. I think the right wing needs to be completely held to account for their misdeeds. Without a reckoning, we will be continually subject to the rewriting of history and the discounting of the actions of the miscreants.
2007
when consequences became visible. The housing boom bust…we entered the current recession… It took a year to admit, while the PTBs told us everything was under control — not to worry. Fourteen months later, all of 2008, finaly we’ve faced up to the mother of all financial crisis. Now the PTB warn the worst is yet to come.
Inside players (now using the D word default and depression) share that this financial collapse will be with us until 2014…as the government moves to nationalize 2 in 10 mortgages; but the core problem – six hundred trillion of OTC derivatives – will be printed/inflated away setting up debasing the U.S.dollar which in its present form will be replaced the third week June 2012.
Welcome to the two extremes: the countries of Zimbabwe and Iceland. We’ll share the same fate: double digit unemployment, food shortages, hyper-inflation and riots.
2004, when Bush was reelected, at which time voters should have known better.
Trying to pick the worst of the 2xxx years is like a terminal patient trying to identify the worst cancer cell. Hopefully, choosing the worst decade will be much easier a century from now.
All of it.
1/20/09: truly the end of an error.
It’s been a horrible decade and each year was filled with outrages and horrors. But, I have to say, 9/11/01 was the beginning of it all so deserves added emphasis. The loss of life and horror wasn’t the worst compared to Katrina or Iraq. Still, up until that brilliant blue-sky morning, I believed we would survive the selection of G.W. with minimal damage.
The casual incompetence or banal evil of letting it happen, his frozen wait to be told what to do, the fearful flight reflex, all of Bush’s reactions on that day were a forshadowing of what was to come. Without 9/11, there would have been no “War on Terra,” no torture, no erosion of Constitutional integrity, no damned excuse for his theft of the election in 2004.
Bush rigging the election in 2000 was a fork in the road. 9/11 was an intersection where we made a hard right turn.
I think that collectively thinking of the Bush years as the worst decade ever for the US pretty much sums it up. Hopefully we’ll be getting things to turn around by the end of the decade, but I don’t think we’ve hit bottom yet.
I agree with nearly everything being posted here. Let me add the Enron meltdown of 2001-2. Kind of served as a preview of coming attractions…
It was all horrible. Personally, I was more deeply affected by the suffering of the people of New Orleans. The horror and anger of that week outranks everything else for me. Knowing that people tried to rush to their aid and were turned back by those in authority, and all the incidents of abuse by the privileged breaks my heart.
So I say 2005 was the worst. It started with our “representatives” rushing toward the Schiavo spotlight to seize more power.
And speaking of privilege: 2006 brought us Cheney’s shotgun adventure, Ken Lay’s ‘death’ and vacated conviction.
Maybe we had to sink this low to realize that our own privilege doesn’t set us above anybody else in the boat.
One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all takes a lot more work, and now we’re ready for it.
So it goes.
The worst of times?
The true depth of the decline that started the day Clinton got honeytrapped in the Oral Orfice. Errr…Oval Office. (Who’s writing this shit, anyway? Clever bastid, whatever (s)he is. Got a Dickensian knack for names.)
The bottom of a declining curve.
The best of times?
Nowhere to go but up.
You know the old saying, right?
What goes down must come up?
Or is it what goes down must go down? No…wait…that’s Monica’s motto.
What goes up must go up?
Nooo……that’s Bill’s thing. (A little crooked, maybe. But functional.)
Wait.
Oh dear.
Nevermind.
It gets SO CONFUSING sometimes!!!
Your friend
Emily
Happy new year, Arthur. They say some brain exercise helps with that confusion. I tried to learn that embed thing but alas – HTML errors. Even Booman’s FAQ is no help, so nevermind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-l91O9VxN0
Maybe I’ll learn Chinese.
Like this:
Get rid of everything but the < sign before embed search, then get rid of everything from allowscriptaccess to true, including excess quotation marks. Make sure that there is a space between flash” and width and there you have it.
For a visual idea of what it looks like, go to “history” on your dropdown browser menu, then find where the post starts and take a look.
Happy New Year.
AG
Wow! Thanks. That helped a lot.
I can’t believe I did it. It really IS a revolution, the end of somebody’s confusion. I haven’t listened to a song that much in one day in forty years.
If a cyberfool like myself can get to it…anybody can.
Glad to be of help.
AG
The individual outrages are too numerous to list. Down the line 2008 will be seen as the year when everything fell apart. I was lucky enough to have to work New Year’s Eve. I see very little reason to be optimistic about 2009 and with the bombs falling in Gaza, celebrating just wasn’t an option.
On reflection, I have to say that the whole thing was a horror show, though I have to say that for me it got increasingly unbearable starting about the summer of 2002 when they started to ramp up the marketing campaign for their criminal action in Iraq, and just kept getting worse and worse and worse from that point on.