Freedom's, uh, a good thing, a-yuck, a-yuck

If President Bush bails out the Big Three automakers, that act will finally make him one of the worst presidents of the last 100 years -- and seal his "legacy" as one of the most clueless simpletons who ever occupied the Oval Office and compromised freedom.

Since taking office in 2001, he has shown himself no friend of free markets or liberty with the following: 1) the “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2002; 2) the Medicare Act of 2003 on prescription drugs (called “the greatest expansion in America’s welfare state in 40 years”); 3) failure to partially privatize Social Security when he had the chance in 2004; 4) failure to relieve massive regulation on oil drilling; 5) veto of fundamental stem cell research in July 2006; 6) building a monstrous wall between the U.S. and our friends in Mexico; 7) enhancement of the abysmal “drug war”; 8) beginning of a trillion-dollar war in Iraq instead of strategically annihilating the military-industrial complex of terrorist nations such as Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela and Afghanistan; 9) approval of tens of billions in aid to foreign countries; 10) failure to protect U.S. company assets that were confiscated in Venezuela and elsewhere; 11) approval of a giant, reprehensible bailout of Wall Street.

President Bush’s equivocation on freedom belies a muddled intellect, whose expression wrought its finest (lowest) hour on Sept. 14, 2001, when he referred to the 9-11 murderers as “the people who knocked these buildings down.” What! Did he think they were bad boys playing with Tinker Toys? Any true lover of freedom winced at the hokey inanity and wistfully wished for a Ronald Reagan eloquence at such a perilous moment – perhaps something along the lines of “these demented assassins who destroyed two towering beacons of free America and murdered thousands of hard-working citizens.” Bush isn't a cowboy; he's a boy-cow.

If the president revives the Big Three from their much-deserved death rattle, then he will have sealed his fate as one of this country’s most ineloquent and preposterously befuddled leaders. That won't prevent him from doing yuck-yuck speaking tours at $50,000 a pop after he rides his ass into the sunset. But at least the smirking dimwit will no longer be that guy who is knocking this freedom-thing down.