The History News Network conducted an informal poll on Thursday asking American historians from the nation’s top research universities and liberal arts colleges to grade the presidency of George W. Bush on an A-F scale, based on fourteen different metrics, ranging from foreign policy to the economy to transparency and accountability. Sixty-four historians responded. Thirty-five — over half — rated his presidency an outright failure. “Thank you, God, for this opportunity,” one professor, a faculty member at one of the service academies, wrote in a comment. “He was not qualified to be president and it showed for eight long years.”
It’s been interesting- and rather nauseating- watching the mainstream media fall over themselves in their efforts to whitewash George W. Bush’s legacy. With his Presidential library on the verge of opening to the public, the dedication ceremony was a paean to our collective inability to recall what really happened during The Reign of Error ©. We’ve chosen to forget the lies, the deception, and the propaganda. We’ve chosen to misremember we were manipulated into a war that had nothing to do with 9.11. Worst of all, we’ve neglected to remember the 5,000 young American men and women who came home in flag-draped boxes. We’ve blown right by (if we ever recognized it at all) that George & Dick’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq © left somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 Iraqis dead.
Now we’re back to hearing that Captain Codpiece © kept America safe for eight years. Right; except for the four planes were hijacked and three were flown into buildings in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Suddenly, Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader© was a statesman, a prescient leader whose steady hand kept terrorism at bay.
Or something like that.
Juan Cole wrote an excellent piece detailing how Right Wingers are like the children of alcoholics…and he’s spot on in his description of the collective amnesia surrounding The Worst President EVER ©
It is a well-known syndrome in alcoholic and/or abusive families that the child runs to the abusive parent, and makes excuses for him or her. In fact there are a whole set of syndromes afflicting the poor adults who lived through that horror as children.
The fawning interviews attending the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library, for the least bookish of all our presidents, struck me as having a lot of resemblance to those syndromes. America has a problem holding its high elected officials to account….
We named the airport in our national capital for a man who sold weapons stolen from Pentagon warehouses to Ayatollah Khomeini at at time the latter was on a terror watch list, and used the black money thus gained to support right wing death squads in Central America. We let a war criminal pronounce himself comfortable with his crimes against humanity.
Whether it’s assuage their guilt and/or shame, the Bush apologists are actively engaged in selectively remembering and interpreting the past. They lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth. They build Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader © up to be something he never was. They construct fantasies that paint him as a statesman and a leader. They pretend that it was his leadership and vision that kept us safe…yet they choose to misremember that the Bush Administration was handed an opportunity to stop 9.11 before it happened and whiffed on it.
Those on the Right who defend the former President have anointed themselves as Very Serious and Important People, as if they’re compensating for something they can’t admit was never on their side- the truth. You see them all over the media, blaming Barack Obama for everything from Beghazi to Boston to the Mets’ underperforming pitching staff. It’s the sort of “analysis” and trial by media they never would have tolerated during The Reign of Error ©. Whether it’s thinly veiled racism, amnesia, or a willful and coordinated effort to rewrite history, there’s little intellectual or moral honesty to be had.
To make matters worse, the Right has their own cable “news” outlet- Fox News Channel- dedicated to advancing their talking points and version of reality. This “reality” is fed to the multitudes 24/7/365, constantly proving and reproving Goebbels’ theory: Repeat a lie often enough and it eventually becomes the truth.
In time, we’ll end up with opposing histories and remembrances of The Reign of Error ©. There will be the accurate history, written by historians who will rely on demonstrable facts. And there will be the fawning, George-W.-Bush-is-my-hero whitewashing of one of the most criminally dishonest and inept Presidencies in our history.
Take your pick, America; the truth or feel-good propaganda?
As if I need to ponder that question for more than a nanosecond….
