Condi Rice, Ph.D., tells us:

I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he’s done. This generation will.

And since Condi is so smart, and always right, and certainly never lies to us about anything, I figured I may as well steal a march on everyone else and start my thank-you now.

So thank you, George Bush, for bringing us fair-and-balanced government.

Take OSHA, for instance. Old, unenlightened administrations ran OSHA with reckless disregard for how all the regulations and warnings were affecting the companies who, after all, are the backbone of the economy. Not so the Bush administration, which fully understands the importance of giving everyone a voice and a seat at the table:

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day’s exposure at the agency’s permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country’s principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

“In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay,” Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency’s director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from “the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues,” to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton’s tenure, according to White House lists.
[...]
“The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction,” said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been “like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out,” Harrison said.

Giving credit where it is due, the Bush administration pretty much pioneered the fair-and-balanced approach of allowing affected companies equal say in the drafting of rules and regulations. This, let us remember, is the thinking that brought us some of the most cherished economic highlights of the Bush presidency. The mortgage market meltdown, for example.

And so I say to George Bush — and I hope you will join me — “For everything you did, George Bush, thanks! In fact, thanks a lot!”