Bush and Cheney's Foul Legacy

Squandering billions and billions of dollars on wars that could never be won was but one of the disasters that George W. Bush's toxic administration brought to America,  There are many other things many Americans would like to forget (the GOP base still hasn't admitted that they happened) such as torture as US policy, the biggest security lapse since Pearl Harbor, spying on US citizens, and actions that were clearly unconstitutional.  Despite this foul legacy, Bush and company is trying to make the public forget the damage done by this cretinous president and his megalomaniac vice president.  Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times that looks at the Bush Presidential Library's effort to airbrush history in the hope history will forget the damage Bush/Cheney wrought on America.  Here are excerpts:

After four years of bending the Constitution, the constitutional law professor now in the White House is trying to unloose the Gordian knot of W.’s martial and moral overreaches after 9/11. 

In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama talked about how we “compromised our basic values,” and he concluded with a slap at W.: “Our victory against terrorism won’t be measured in a surrender ceremony at a battleship or a statue being pulled to the ground.” 

On the eve of the president’s speech, I was at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum here, watching the film of Saddam’s statue being pulled to the ground. 

It’s remarkable that Obama is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency just as W. is trying to escape the shadow of the Bush presidency. Browsing the library, you wonder if these two presidents are complete opposites after all, as you see how history was shaped by an arrogant, press-averse, father-fixated, history-obsessed, strangely introverted chief executive.

W.’s library highlights his role in launching the Global War on Terror, an Orwellian phrase designed to conflate the sins of Osama, who was responsible for 9/11, and the sins of Saddam, who was not. That was the fatal mistake and hallmark of the Bush era. W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld declared war on a tactic, stoked fear as a smokescreen and treated pre-emptive attacks as just. 

Conservatives can honk, as Senator Saxby Chambliss did, that Obama’s speech “will be viewed by terrorists as a victory.” But this president has killed more top Qaeda operatives than Bush did. While W.’s bullhorn vow after 9/11 to catch the “people who knocked these buildings down” plays every few minutes at his library, I couldn’t find any photos of Osama or acknowledgment of Bush’s failure to catch him. Obama’s library will have a wing for that feat. 

You could fill an entire other library with what’s not in W.’s. Cheney and Rummy have been largely disappeared, and it is Condi Rice who narrates the 9/11 video. You won’t see the iconic “Mission Accomplished” photo, or that painful video in which W. keeps reading “The Pet Goat” to children after learning that America is under attack, or the notorious “flyover” photo of a desultory Bush jetting from Crawford to the White House and looking through the window of Air Force One at Katrina’s devastation. 

Mostly, aside from the word “freedom” reverberating endlessly, we see the kinder, gentler W. conjured by Laura the Librarian.   .  .  .  .  Proving that the library is more a monument to Laura’s artful airbrushing than W.’s artless leadership, there’s a swank Café 43 with fancier fare than W.’s cherished PB&J’s, and a gift shop featuring Laura’s favorite books, from Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” to Truman Capote’s “Music for Chameleons.” 

We need to never forget the disasters Bush and his Republican sycophant brought to America lest we be doomed to repeat the same horrors in the future.  Jingoism and waving the flag and talking about patriotism do not make one a true patriot or protect the nation.  Sometimes, the biggest patriots are those who call out the errors made - and horrors created -   by those who warp themselves in the American flag.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney betrayed thousands of our nation's service members and thousands paid with their lives or now find themselves horrible maimed.  We need to honor our fallen.  But we cannot forget those who sent many to needless deaths.