It was probably Michael Ortiz Hill, author of 1994’s Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse As
a Rite of Passage who started it with a comment in a January 2003 essay for
the political newsletter CounterPunch.
Hill said of George W. Bush, “The man is delusional and the
shape of his delusion is specifically apocalyptic in belief and intent”.
Twelve years down the road, conventional wisdom may have
settled down a bit. The Bush legacy, so far as the mainstream media is
concerned, may be that of a bit of a goofball, an accused liar, an incompetent
or even the architect of multiple foreign policy disasters.
But what the Bush presidency demonstrably failed to do was to usher in Armageddon, if indeed that was ever his intention.