Peter Schiff, a conservative-leaning libertarian and author who is contemplating a run against Democratic Connecticutt Senator Chris Dodd, was on the Daily Show last night to talk about his latest book as well as the current state of our economy. Now, I was only vaguely familiar with Schiff prior to his Daily Show appearance, as Schiff is well known in paleolibertarian circles and shares a political philosophy that is similar to Ron Paul’s. However, his appearance on the Daily Show was the first time I had seen him in such a high profile venue and in front of a left-leaning crowd that might be hostile towards some of his political views. However, Schiff actually came across rather well in the interview, with Jon Stewart going so far as to showing old footage from the cable news networks showing pundits ridiculing him even as he offered economic predictions that, in retrospect, have actually proven to be fairly accurate.

Towards the end of the interview, he hinted at running against Dodd. Running as a Republican in a liberal state against an entrenched Democrat, Schiff would probably be an underdog. But Dodd’s connections with the banking industry cannot be helping him all that much at a time when the government is giving billions of dollars to Wall Street in the midst of an economic recession. And a win by Schiff would put in the U.S. Senate a libertarian-leaning, indepedent-minded Republican who, like Ron Paul in the U.S. House of Representatives, would be critical of the political leadership of both political parties.

During a Congressional Hearing that was held last Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the Federal Government's marijuana laws, trumpeting the familiar "Gateway Drug" Theory that has been a staple among the line of excuses uttered by Drug War Defenders for more than half a century. At least one congressman, however, wasn't going to let him peddle this tired refrain and get away from it.

In a rare instance of a sitting politician taking on a Drug War Defender, Democratic Congressman Steven Cohen of Tennessee pressed the FBI Director to defend the Federal Government's marijuana laws. As the above video shows, Mueller stumbled badly in trying to defend these laws and was eventually forced to concede that no adult has ever died from using marijuana. But that didn't stop him from resorting to the the tired "Gateway Drug" Theory, which Cohen handles masterfully:

MUELLER: The only thing I would say is, you talk to parents that have lost their children to drugs--

COHEN: Right.

MUELLER: --and they will inevitably say that they started off with marijuana.

COHEN: They probably started off with milk and then went on to beer . . . and then went on to bourbon . . . and they might have gone on to marijuana. The Gateway Theory doesn't work.

According to the National Priorities Project, the War in Iraq has now cost American taxpayers $670 billion. That stands in stark contrast to the $100 billion to $200 billion pricetage estimated by President Bush's chief economic advisor in September 2002 or the $50 billion to $60 billion estimate offered by the White House Office of Management and Budget Director in 2002.

The National Priorities Project explains how it calculates the cost of the war:

To date, the total cost of war that has been allocated by Congress is $830.2 billion, with $657.3 to Iraq and $172.9 to Afghanistan. In addition, on April 9, 2009, the new administration requested, in a final emergency supplemental, an additional $ 77.1 billion in war spending. Our estimates are that approximately $52.7 billion of that will be for Iraq and the remaining $24.4 billion for Afghanistan. As more information becomes available, we will revisit our estimates.

The numbers include military and non-military spending, such as reconstruction. Spending only includes incremental costs - additional funds that are expended due to the war. For example, soldiers' regular pay is not included, but combat pay is included. Potential future costs, such as future medical care for soldiers and veterans wounded in the war, are not included. It is also not clear whether the current funding will cover all military wear and tear. It also does not account for the wars being deficit-financed and that taxpayers will need to make additional interest payments on the national debt due to those deficits.

This number is based on an analysis of the legislation in which Congress has allocated for the war so far and research by the Congressional Research Service (latest report) which has access to Department of Defense financial reports. An article offered by the Strauss Military Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information offers greater insight into the problems of truly knowing how much has been spent on the Iraq War or other military operations.

To get a better grasp on exactly how much this war is costing American taxpayers, consider this: at the current rate of spending, the war in Iraq is costing approximately:

$108 billion per year

$9 billion per month

$295 million per day

$12.3 million per hour

At about this time of year seven years ago, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings were somewhere in the low to mid 50’s. Not exactly mandate-like numbers, but not too shabby for a guy who managed to slip into office with just 48% of the popular vote and a mere 5 vote margin of victory in the electoral college. Already, he had weathered the defection of Senator Jeffords from the Republican Party, which effectively handed the Senate to the Democrats, and he had navigated the delicate issue of embryonic stem cells by announcing his support for federal funding of limited research on existing embryonic stem cells while promising not to extend funding toward any embryonic stem cells that might be created in the future.

The country was very much divided over President Bush and his policies. And then September 11 happened, and almost overnight, the president’s approval numbers shot into the stratosphere–90% by some polls. Indeed, as the President stood amid the ruins of the World Trade Center beside NYC fire fighters and police officers and rallied the nation behind him, it seemed that Republicans and Democrats alike were ready to support him, and for a while, they did.

But now, seven years later, those days seem like a distant memory. The once proud Leader of the Free World who rallied much of the world to our cause is now hated or mistrusted by much of the globe, and the Chief Executive who once commanded the highest approval ratings in American history has now become laughably irreverent–even by Lame Duck standards. Indeed, following 2001, Bush’s approval ratings dropped, with each year’s being lower than the one before it.

PollingReport.com is one of the rare websites that has kept a record of Bush approval ratings from various polling agencies going back to January of 2001. And calculating the average of polls* for each of the years from 2002 to 2008 shows a damning trend:

2002 70.5% (based upon a total of 187 polls)
2003 61.2% (based upon a total of 223 polls)
2004 49.4% (based upon a total of 205 polls)
2005 44.4% (based upon a total of 155 polls)
2006 37.8% (based upon a total of 189 polls)
2007 32.4% (based upon a total of 150 polls)
2008 30.4% (based upon a total of 93 polls)

Rarely has a the highest office holder in the land plummeted from such highs to such lows. He made the War on Terrorism the centerpiece of his presidency, and though this policy paid high dividends at first, Bush soon found himself captive to this policy, as it eclipsed virtually every other policy that he had laid out prior to September 11.

One wonders what might have become of George W. Bush had September 11 never happened. Would he have been more successful as a peacetime president? Would the partisanship that had evolved from the administration’s controversial (and increasingly devisive) foreign policy been averted had Bush sought to realize some of his domestic policies, and possibly reaching out to both Republicans and Democrats along the way?

Alas, we shall never know.

Perhaps it is too soon to say what George W. Bush’s legacy shall be. Democrats will likely characterize him as a staunch right-winger who stubbornly clung on to failed conservative policies, while Republicans will likely characterize him as tragic hero whose heart was in the right place but who stumbled in his prosecution of the war in Iraq and made too many concessions to his Democratic opponents.

And both would be wrong to make such arguments, because George W. Bush is neither a staunch right-winger nor some type of misunderstood tragic hero. When looking back on his presidency, historians will have to judge George W. Bush a failure, not because he failed to adequately appease the Left or the Right…but because he utterly failed to live up to the campaign promises he made in 2000:

Bush the Fiscal Conservative:

During the run up to the 2000 presidential election, Bush stressed over and over again that he was a fiscal conservative. To be sure, his “compassionate conservatism” made some of the free market faithful a bit nervous, but Bush the younger offered plenty of assurances that he would not repeat the mistake of Bush the Elder. Not only would he not raise taxes; he would offer the biggest tax cut since President Ronald Reagan 20 years earlier. And while he and then Vice President Al Gore debated about lockboxes and fuzzy math, Bush assured the American people that deficit spending would not occur on his watch.

Well, we all know how that turned out. Under the Bush administration, we have had deficit spending for the last seven years. Bush defenders have, of course, argued that the destruction caused by the September 11 terrorist attacks was largely to blame for the downturn in the economy and that the federal government’s actions in the wake of September involved necessary spending the tipped us towards deficit spending.

Yet, to accept such talking points is to conveniently ignore the debate that was raging only days before the September 11 terrorist attacks shocked our country and suddenly pushed all other topics out of the way. Even then, as the shadow of deficit spending was creeping over the nation, Democrats and Republicans were arguing over the rate at which the economy could be expected to grow over the upcoming year.

Democrats, eager to discredit the president’s fiscal policies, argued that the rate of growth would be very low, making deficit spending inevitable. Republicans, eager to defend the president’s fiscal policies, argued that the rate of growth would be much higher, thus averting deficit spending. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, argued that the rate of growth would fall somewhere between that proposed by the Democrats and Republicans, with the result being deficits if government spending continued as expected.

According to the Libertarian Cato Institute, President Bush, during his first term in office, presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. And this holds true even when excluding spending devoted to defense and homeland security. In terms of rate of government spending, under “conservative” President Bush, spending increased faster than under both “liberal” Presidents Clinton and Carter.

Bush the Noninterventionist:

During the second of the three 2000 presidential debates between then Governor George W. Bush and then Vice President Al Gore, Bush made it clear that while he agreed with then President Clinton’s decision to intervene in Serbia, he did not agree with the overall interventionist foreign policy under Clinton. He distinctly argued for a “humble foreign policy” and against “nation-building.”

Yet now our military finds itself in Iraq, as part of the biggest nation-building exercise since World War II. Under President Bush, our military has engaged in the very thing that then Governor Bush rejected. And his administration’s “You’re either with us or against us” hypernationalistic machismo and childish derision of France and Germany as “Old Europe” simply because they argued against the invasion of Iraq is hardly the “humble foreign policy” then Governor Bush promised only three years earlier.

Bush the Federalist:

Bush has never made secret of the fact that he is a social conservative, whether it’s opposition to abortion, opposition to medical marijuana, or opposition to gay marriage. Yet, in 2000, then Governor George W. Bush chose to tread the fine line that comes between advocating that the government pass socially conservative legislation and advocating that the government adhere to the tenets of federalism.

When confronted with the issue of medical marijuana as a candidate for president in 2000, then Governor Bush said that medical marijuana was a “state’s rights” issue, and that if he was elected president, his administration would not interfere with state medical cannabis laws. Yet, once elected to the presidency, Bush appointed avowed drug warriors such as John Ashcroft, Asa Hutchinson, and John Walters to key positions in the federal government (Attorney General, Director of the DEA, and Drug Czar, respectively), where they went on direct raids against and prosecute medical marijuana growers in California, despite the fact that the state had passed Proposition 215, a piece of legislation the explicitly made medical marijuana legal.

Bush made a similar pledge with respect to gay marriage. During the South Carolina 2000 Republican Primary Debate with John McCain and Alan Keyes, then Governor Bush got into a testy exchange with moderator Larry King in which King asked Bush if he, as President, would interject himself into a debate in which a state was voting on allowing gay marriage, Bush stated, “The state can do what they want to do.”

It must have seemed like a safe answer back at a time when few states were seriously contemplating passing legislation allowing gay marriage. But after gay marriage and same sex civil union legislation passed in Massachusettes and Vermont and threatened to pass in other states as well, Bush suddenly decided that the States Rights position was no longer a tenable one, and he pledged his support to an amendment to the Constitution that would ban gay marriage.

Bush the Uniter:

As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush gained the reputation as a Republican who could work with Democrats in the Texas congress. This gave him an edge over then Vice President Al Gore who despite his reputation as a centrist Democrat in the U.S. Senate, was perceived to have moved to the left during his years in the Clinton Administration and lacked the same ability to work with Republicans. Little mention was made of the fact that Texan Democrats were more much more politically conservative than Democrats in much of the rest of the country, making their ability to cooperate with Texas Republicans far less surprising that the average voter might think.

Perhaps, in his heart, Bush assumed the presidency willing to work with Democrats. Certainly, if there was hostility between the two, it went both ways. But if Bush meant to live up to his reputation as a uniter, he certainly didn’t show it by appointing Karl Rove to the position of Senior Advisor and Dick “Go F@*% Yourself” Cheney as Vice President.

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*Disclaimer: Only polls framing the question in terms of “approve” versus “disapprove” were including in this causal study. Polls that framed the question in terms of “excellent” versus “pretty good” versus “fair” versus “poor” (such as Harris Poll and Zogby Poll) were not included.

NOTE: Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice.