The Bush drive to the Dark Ages.

I have no doubt that if Saudi, UAE, Egyptian and Lebanese (That's right. None of them were Iraqi) terrorists had not carried out attacks on the United States on 11 September, 2001, George W. Bush and the administration which followed him into office would have been unceremoniously dumped by the American electorate in 2004.

Bush is mediocrity personified and such an intellectual midget that the worst of his decisions, hidden by the calamity of mass destruction, would have been so obvious, such simple fodder for an over-indulging media, that he would have been viewed by 2003 by most voters as a relatively useless and ineffective president.

Bush was re-elected on the basis of one watershed event, for which he can be held, at least partially, culpable. He and his administration treated the warnings they were issued as something insignificant. Far from possessing the mettle of a world leader, Bush, whose job was to stand on that wall and be aware of what was going on outside it, was blissfully unaware of the world outside his little bubble. He not only had his back turned when the wall was breached; he wasn't even at his post.

Bush was a 9 to 5 operator. His style? Delegate and disappear.

Had 9/11 never happened he would have been sent packing at the next presidential election. In a nation where hard work and innovation are viewed as the concurrent paths to personal prosperity, Bush viewed the end of the 1999 election campaign and the legal challenge which would land him in the Oval Office as the acme of success. His legacy was the fact that he had actually achieved that high office. He could ride the next four years simply signing off on policy written by those who had financed his run. It would have been so easy.

Then someone blew up a chunk of his country.

Americans can be excused for the decision they made in 2004. They had no idea the kind of grotesque national administration they were handing over. They had been traumatized and having suffered that kind of trauma they were unwilling to risk the proverbial "changing horses in mid-stream".

The news media naturally focused on the major events which surrounded the Bush presidency: the aftermath of 9/11, the need to combat a particular threat and Iraq, which had more than a few people confused. What the media did not cover were the policies which were doing actual damage.

The United States was once a manufacturing leviathan. That has diminished as, in an expanding world, the shop floor moved across the Pacific. What would, under normal circumstance, have replaced that manufacturing prowess was academic and scientific innovation. In the absence of durable goods for export, the United States was well positioned to advance its leadership as a scientific powerhouse.

Until George W Bush, intellectual pygmy, killed that too.

Chris Mooney lays out the wreckage Bush has wrought upon science and its integration in political decision making.

Over the past seven years, Mr Bush has shown a disturbing unwillingness to change his mind or admit to errors of fact or judgment. So we are probably safe in assuming he will not significantly alter course on the leading science policy topics of the day - embryonic stem cell research and global warming.

In each case, Mr Bush made a policy decision back in 2001 based upon false, incomplete, or misleading information and has since fought a rearguard action to prevent either acknowledging these deceptions or their obvious implication - that the 2001 policies should be reversed.

By way of example:

Take embryonic stem cell research. Mr Bush claimed in 2001 that he would allow significant federally funded research to go forward on "more than 60" genetically diverse available lines. Only a third as many actually existed and there were various problems with them, including a marked lack of said genetic diversity. This meant that Mr Bush's policy didn't even make sense on its own terms. Supposedly a "compromise," it proved little more than a sham and were it not for 9/11 and the dramatic shift in US priorities that understandably followed, this fact would have been widely exposed far sooner.

And that is the point. Bush got away with pursuing his Christian conservative agenda because the media was completely and utterly distracted. Given the choice of actually researching and analyzing critical decisions on the advancement of science or reporting on the advance of the the 3rd Infantry Division into Baghdad, well, we all know how that went. Science isn't sexy, but live coverage of bombs, bullets and dusty boots is pure entertainment. And good entertainment brings in something even more important - advertising dollars. For the pursuit of that dollar and for leaving coverage of the mess Bush has created in US involvement in biomedical science to the scientific journals, they, the collective popular media, can be held responsible for not questioning why the US has lost its edge in the scientific world.

For example, it seems scarcely disputable that the advancement of embryonic stem cell science has been delayed and hampered. We can't point to specific cures for specific diseases that we lack because of Mr Bush - it's not that simple. But a reasonable assumption is that Mr Bush has set back US biomedical research considerably and allowed other enterprising nations to surge into the void.

There was a point when the US, as a means to make globalization work in its favour, was willing to accept the loss of manufacturing dominance in the world by replacing it with scientific supremacy.

Thanks to Bush, and seven years of vacuous leadership, the US has been stripped of that too.

H/T reader Cat