So our pal Dubya has offered up an autobiographical reflection of his presidency in the book Decision Points (out just recently).

I have not read the book so reviewing it does seem unfair. But I did live through his presidency so when I saw this line in a review, well… it pretty much summed it up quite nicely for me.

Looking back on his exit from office, Bush recalls, “I reflected on everything we were facing. Over the past few weeks we had seen the failure of America’s two largest mortgage entities, the bankruptcy of a major investment bank, the sale of another, the nationalization of the world’s largest insurance company, and now the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Russia had invaded and occupied Georgia, Hurricane Ike had hit Texas, and America was fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was one ugly way to end the presidency.”

Or begin a new presidency, depending on how you look at it. (Really, I am sure Obama still can’t thank you enough for passing him the torch the way you did.)

Is he trying to whitewash his very considerable candidacy for most incompetent president ever or he just a regular ol’ guy who is earnestly showing how, “Shucks, I did the best I could and dad-gummit, I done pretty good all things considered.”

This guy is forever going to be like some kind of American Rorschach Test where you see what you want to see in him.

And what he left behind is what he left behind. And he left No Child Left Behind behind lest we forget that crowning achievement as well.

As a writer, one of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Douglass Adams. He says: “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”

Too funny, right?

Well, it seems as if George Dubya Bush, once again, has a preposterous amount of egg on his face. Why? Because he set forth a ridiculous deadline that no one in the field of education (no one worth their salt, I should say) ever though would possibly be made and poof! now the Obama administration is left with cleaning up more of George Dubya Bush’s mess.

Seems that the “mandate” that all school children reach 100% academic proficiency by the year 2014 is gonna get yanked. (Read here for more.)

And why? Because this deadline was never anything more than a political platitude that Bush used to try and trump up goodwill for his political tenure anyway — crafted into policy at the expense of reality, of course. A reality, BTW, that he knew he’d never be on the hook for because his term in office would have long since been finished. (A few years too late on that front, if you ask me, but that’s fodder for another blog post.)

Yes, the aims of “closing the achievement gap” and “raising academic proficiency” are still going to stick around… but the deadline to do so is gonna be ka-boshed.

Still in Iraq, pulling the plug on NCLB’s proficiency deadline, financially reeling from deregulating the credit markets to the point of implosion while hunting for WMD’s that were trumped up to begin with… The guy makes Nixon look like Lincoln.

Whoosh! Ka-BOOM!

The sound of a deadline colliding with reality.