Welcome to You’re the Pundit. Here is where we start a conversation. It’s your turn. Share your ideas, ask questions and answer them.

Every week we post a question ripped from the news pages. Hit us with your best shot—of opinion—or react to someone else’s views. Either way, help us think through the issues of the day.

Let’s keep it civil—and have some fun.

This week’s question: How will President George W. Bush be viewed in history?

Considering the Fees paid for speaking by International ties to Business thats related to Free Trade Agreements , how is a President going to be able to Draft Policies in the best Interest of the American people , and it not a Conflict of interest of the Best interest of the American people when the Office of the presidency is not an Independent body , with Hillary in the WhiteHouse and Bill over in a Country talking about our Relations and how we do Business with other countries , and they are paying Bill Speaking Fees , and they want a little better deal from America and the Phone rings at 3 AM , and its Bill saying Honey , don’t finish that one Policy yet .............kinda makes ya wonder if we the People will be the first to be considered , when we have already seen our SS and Medicare systems depleted , and not funded like they should have been with all this Free trade imports that should have been paying a Little tariff into the programs to off set the loss from US labor making those products that would have paid into the system and kept it solvent !!!!!!

Penn Quits Amid Colombia Controversy

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120752124724993417.html?mod=fpa_whatsnews

History is a fickle thing. History remembers Christopher Columbus fondly. We gave him his own holiday despite his vicious and horrifically cruel genocide of the entire Arawak population.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine Bush not being remembered as an ignorant, incompetent, arrogant thug who could barely speak his own language and ruined America’s reputation in the world, perhaps permanently.

Certainly he will be forever bound to Iraq; perhaps as the evil-yet-inept architect who, at best, distorted, misrepresented incoherent fragments of evidence into a justification for war and occupation or perhaps simply as the half-witted grinning buffoon who allowed himself to be manipulated into war by Dick Cheney and the neocons.

The people of New Orleans will surely remember how he blithely ignored their crisis for days, vacationing in Crawford while people died by the hundreds and seasoned reporters broke down and cried for help on camera. “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” captures the sense of Bush’s arrogant trust in the incompetence he surrounded himself with and uncaring ignorance of the reality staring him in the face.

The world will of course remember Bush as the torture president. Who can forget Senators Warner and McCain having to trek up to the White House to beg Bush to agree to sign a defense appropriations bill that included an instruction to the president that he should not commit torture. We all breathed a sigh of relief when the president agreed to stop his policy of torture by signing the bill, then rolled our eyes in disbelief and disgust as he issued a signing statement stating that he wasn’t bound by the provisions of the bill and would continue his torture policy.

Along with the torture is the spying. I think it unlikely that history will remember, at least prominently, the fact that Bush’s illegal wiretapping program began months before 9/11 at the AT&T;switching center in San Francisco simply because most people don’t know about it. History may remember that Bush lied about constitutional safeguards being in place with his domestic spying operations (history seems to like pointing out the lies).

Signing statements surely will be a part of the Bush legacy. What other American could get away with ignoring the law simply by stating that he or she didn’t agree with it?

History likes having one or two stand-out events or issues to define a president I think. Lincoln freeing the slaves; Nixon and Watergate; Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, etc. With Bush there is just so much though. Who can forget the Harriet Meyers nomination, the Dubai port security fiasco, “Mission Accomplished”, “our childrens is learning” and rewriting EPA global warming reports to deny global warming?

Will history highlight the fact that Bush inherited the largest budget surplus in American history and will be leaving office having run up a budget deficit larger than the deficits of all other presidents combined? That he passed out huge tax cuts to the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans while borrowing billions of dollars from China that our children will have to pay back.

So in the end it’s difficult to predict whether history will remember him more as an evil-yet-bumbling- inarticulate puppet of the neo-cons who hitched Ronald Reagan’s “Shining City on a Hill” to his 4x4 and drug it down the side of the hill or more as an arrogant half-wit who adopted a backwards, good-ole-boy persona in a lame attempt to pass off his profound ignorance and incompetence as somehow superficial and not the tragically correct substance of the man himself.

History is a fickle thing and tends to be kind to affable clowns, and so it’s unlikely, but not entirely out of the question that it will remember “dubya” as our worst president ever.

He has no where to go but up, and like Harry Truman is probably will.

As the decision to confront Islamic terrorism in Iraq proves right and Iraq moves toward a struggling but more peaceful future, history will have to note Bush’s persistance. If Iraq looks more like South Korea and less like North Korea in 50 years, that will be a plus.

The current class of historians and pundits will be replaced with a class not so caught up in the anger against Bush. The “idiot Bush” stories will probably not be as prominent as they are now.

While I expect any terrorist attacks in the next four years to be blamed on Bush, future historians will have the benefit of seeing currently secret documents about stopped attacks and the planning that built up to thwart them.