Ok, so maybe this decade wasn’t too hot, but we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. Sure New Orleans has become an impromptu wildlife refuge/ sewer, but at least your recent unemployment has given you the time to really experience this great country. You could take a trip to New York and look at ground zero (still a hole) and Wall Street (pushed global economy into a hole) before stopping by the UN to see if they’ve found those WMDs yet. Also, be sure to stop by the debt clock, which has started multiplying into numbers even our former president can’t pronounce.

Where did we go wrong?

We Elected the Wrong Guy

We will never know who actually won the vote in Florida, but one thing is pretty clear: the U.S. (or rather the supreme court) chose the wrong guy. After a decade of unprecedented prosperity, America had Clinton fatigue. The blowjob-heard-around-the-world hung heavy over the Gore race and Bill Clinton, one of the most popular presidents of all time (even during the Lewinsky scandal) achieved the undeserved status of persona-non-grata. In the mind of the American people, politics was the sort of thing nerds and Poli-Sci majors worried about while the rest of the country picked the guy they wanted to have a beer with. Oops.

We Passed the Bush Tax Cut

The current U.S. national debt is roaring towards $12 trillion dollars. If the government needed to collect that debt tomorrow, your share would be just shy of $40 grand. The majority of Uncle Sam’s Visa bill can be blamed on the bone-headed and disasterous application of an economic theory. Supply-side economics was an idea developed by Robert Mundell and Arthur Laffer and championed by the Reagan administration (and later Bush). The theory states that cutting taxes, particularly on the higher income brackets, will result in greater economic growth and thus greater government revenue. The only problem: it doesn’t. Over the past 30 years this policy has been tested over and over again with the same result: tax cuts for the wealthy simply decrease government revenue thus adding to the national debt. It’s exactly what the Bush tax cut did. Warren Buffet, the richest man on the planet, recently offered $1 million to anyone on the Forbes’ 400 richest individuals list who could prove that they pay a higher tax rate than their secretaries. He has recieved no takers.

We Invaded Iraq

The war has had a high cost, claiming the lives of 4356 men and women in the armed forces and between 92,000 and 102,000 Iraqi civilians.  Regardless of your current stance on the war, the Downing Street memos, no-bid contracts, and statements of former Bush administration staffers paint a picture of lies and astonishing corruption in the months leading up to the war. Even one of the “defining moments” of the conflict, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down while the crowd of Iraqis cheered, turned out to be completely staged. Also we never paid for the war. The entire cost of the conflict has added to our budget deficit, so we will still be paying for the war decades from now.

We Ignored Climate Change

There is a near-unanimous scientific consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. This inconvenient truth was ignored and even stifled by the Bush administration, making us late to the game while most other countries were investing heavily in energy technology, what Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls “the next great global industry.”

We Embraced Anti-Intellectualism

Thinking can be hard—it’s easier to just go with your gut. Armed with a casual southern swagger and a fake accent, Bush made it cool to be a dumb ass. Numbers and statistics are, after all, cold, boring, and for pocket protector dweebs so everything became open to debate. Evolution? Hmmm poo-flinging chimps can’t be related to my buck-toothed family.

We Embraced Big Business

Remember all those rolling blackouts in California about 5 years ago? Enron (who Fortune magazine declared “America’s Most Innovative Company” for 6 straight years) decided to play games with the California energy market and swindled billions from the state’s taxpayers. Oh and they used a perfectly legal loophole to cook their books until the entire company fell apart like a house of cards. Out of the thousands of knowing criminals, only a handful went to jail while the other assholes got off scot-free and moved to Wall Street to continue the same bullshit. I can has regulation plz?

We Treated the Rest of the World Like Crap

The shallow jingoism of the Bush era cost us our reputation in the international community. Because we were such giant douche bags, tourists stopped coming and less people wanted to do business with us. Now we can be douche bags all the way to the poor house.