The ugly Bush stain: Watchdog group's List of Bush Failures edition

By GottaLaff

This list is of Bush failures is astounding, but not unexpected. Here's the background:

The most comprehensive guide to these and other Bush administration failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently "set out to document just how off-track things have gone," assigning thirteen reporters to document the worst failures of the last eight years.

Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 "that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans."

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI's PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

Here's the list, in part. No amount of scouring, scrubbing, detoxifying, or sanitizing can compensate for the following:

• 730,000 backlogged patent applications
• 760,000 Social Security disability claims
• 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims
• A recurrence of recent losses of hundreds of laptops containing sensitive law enforcement information
• The decision to keep plowing $12.5 billion into a joint civilian-military weather satellite system that is still incomplete and may leave gaps in crucial climate monitoring as older satellites fail
• $300 billion over budget for Defense Department weapons acquisitions
• $100 billion lost every year to corporate offshore tax shelters
• Faulty National Security Administration computer system, which carries a price tag of $4 billion
• The complete failure of a $100 million attempt to create a new system of internal information-sharing for the FBI in the wake of 9/11
• The record $9.91 billion spent on government secrecy in 2007
• The dismissal of all but 17 out of the 1273 whistleblower complaints filed from 2002 to 2008
• Pollution that causes 20,000 deaths a year
• Pollution that puts 60,000 newborns at risk of neurological problems
• A two-thirds dropoff in the cleanup of toxic waste sites
• 2.5 million toxic toys recalled in the summer of 2007

This isn't a stain, it's a cancer.