The greatest achievement of Bush is giving high quality material for Jon Stewart to work with. Whether his personal intelligence was high or low is irrelevant.

The greatest achievement of Bush is giving high quality material for Jon Stewart to work with. Whether his personal intelligence was high or low is irrelevant. But he handled almost any issue with the grace of a monkey with a wrench in a glass castle. With similar results. And he never had any real crisis to deal with. Terrorism while tragic is not a serious geopolitical treat and 9/11 should have been treated like Katrina and not Pearl Harbor(Perpetrators and masterminds and collaborators should have been brought to justice but the Eichmann way - kidnap and trial, as Obama proved the US president have long hands) Mishandling of the financial crisis also didn't help. The decade that US was focused only on terrorism is a wasted time. There could have been much achieved otherwise. Maybe Bush was held hostage by the hardliners in his party that completely took over the party after 2008 - that is argument I can accept and would have made decent Democratic president - he was never openly hostile towards the less fortunate. But his legacy is like so - a wasted decade, 2 infinite wars, more american lives lost in the war on terror than the 9/11 attack themselves, loss of money that could have fixed almost everything in US,the beginning of the erosion of the civil liberties and a financial meltdown.