Bush's Legacy

Are you sick of hearing about this yet?

I'm not even living in the US, but if I read one more comparison between Bush and Truman I'm going to smash my head through a wall. This is a desperate analogy by people grasping at straws. And the simple fact that they repeat it ad naseum indicates they have no better arguments to use.

By now, I think most people are agreed Bush is not going to be remembered as one of our better Presidents. As far back as two years ago, Rolling Stone Magazine featured an article revealing it was already a parlor game among historians to debate whether Bush was the worst President ever, or simply one of the worst.

For the most part, I think the only people repeating the Truman analogy are the people getting paid to do so: Republican PR guys, and right wing journalists. However a few of the rank and file have picked up on it, and are repeating it on their blogs.

Really, if you haven't been watching the news for the past 8 years (or if you've been cocooned inside Fox News and AM radio) I'm not going to try and argue with you here. If you're one of those people who boos when Sarah Palin admits she reads "The New York Times" who am to think I can change your mind here?

For everyone else down on planet earth though, I think the past 8 years speak for themselves.

I don't think we've ever had a President before where so many prominent members of his administration resigned and wrote books about how dishonest his administration was before his term was even up:
his Secretary of Treasury Paul O' Neil (A), his Chief Counter Terrorism Advisor Richard Clarke (A), his Press Secretary Scott McClellan (A), diplomat Joseph Wilson (A) and his director of faith based initiatives John DiIulio.
(Actually in DiIulio's case, it was only a magazine article, rather than a full book of material. Article here).

I know the right wing attack machine has tried to discredit all 5 of these gentlemen, but I think any sane observer has to conclude that either Bush did a really poor job of selecting his people, or there's got to be some fire underneath all this smoke.

And, if this comment by Seymour Hersh is any indication, we can expect a lot more damaging revelations from Bush insiders in the months and years to come.

But in fact, if you've been following the newspapers at all, you know that's just the tip of the iceberg. The disastrous war in Iraq, and the disinformation campaign that led up to it. The massive bungling surrounding Katrina. The Clinton era budget surpluses that turned into record deficits. The environmental protections being gutted at the same time scientists were issuing serious warnings about an upcoming environmental catastrophe. Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Really, Harry Truman? What are those guys smoking? In 50 years, historians are going to decide it was an excellent idea to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and that everything turned out well?
And they're going to decide that it was a stroke of genius to lower taxes at the time and borrow the money for the war from China, and that future generations really didn't mind paying it back at all? And the huge national debt that spiraled out of control didn't cause any problems at all? Bush's decision not to cut short his vacation to visit the disaster areas of Katrina will be looked upon as an example of bold and decisive leadership?

This is a president who won the 2000 election on a constitutional technicality, despite the fact that a majority of people voted for his opponent. He then proceeded to pursue a highly divisive right wing agenda from day one.
He was re-elected in 2004 largely because he and his vice-President told the American people that they would be victims of a terrorist attack if his opponent got elected. And when he was re-elected by the closest margin in history for a sitting president, he used it justify an expanded right wing agenda.

The largest terrorist attack on American soil in history took place while he was in office, and then he campaigned on it in 2004. His administration is now touting as his legacy the fact that it was never repeated. The implication again being: if a Democrat had been in office, we would have all been blown to pieces.
(As if Bush himself were pouring over all the CIA data and single handledly keeping our boarders safe. He's more than happy to personally take credit for the CIA's successes, while he consistently blames the WMD disaster on bad intelligence from the CIA).

This is also a man under whose leadership one of the greatest economic meltdowns took place, but of course after 8 years as President none of it was his fault (and in fact can be traced back to the economic policies of President Clinton).

This is a man whose administration waged a public battle against congress for the right to torture detainees. Tell me with a straight face this isn't a low point of civilization.

But of course I've barely even begun to list the problems. As this cartoon says: "Bush V. Gore, Cheney's Energy task force, Kenny Boy Lay, Putin's soul, "Bin Laden Determined to strike", 9-11, Axis of Evil, freedom fries, Patriot act, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, yellow cake uranium, shock and awe, mission accomplished, Halliburton, Blackwater, Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, swift boating, tax cuts, soaring deficits, Terry Schiavo, stem cell research, domestic surveillance, telecom immunity, hurricane Katrina, the collapse of capitalism as we know it, and Karl Rove. And that's just off the top of my head!"

The Iraq war disaster should be enough by itself to sink Bush's legacy. Although I know it's hard to debate this with conservatives, because they live in a fantasy world where the US had every right to invade, Saddam Hussein was the only ruthless dictator in the world, the US never supported him in the past, WMDs have been discovered, he had connections with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqis are grateful that we invaded and bombed their infrastructure, the war is going great, and if we just hang in there for a few more years everything is going to turn out great and history will realize Bush made a great decision when he invaded.

It's hard to debate people so divorced from reality, so I'm not even going to try.

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But all that being said, it should be interesting to see how Bush fits into his place in history. The idealist inside all of us would like to think that with the distance of time, we will be able to objectively judge Bush's legacy. But perhaps instead we should remember Orwell's slogan: "Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future." Or, in other words, in the next 20 or 30 years we should expect a lot of battling over Bush's legacy.

It would be nice if one January 21st, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the rest of them said, "Well, now that the Bush Presidency is finally over, I at last see the light and I realize it was a failure."
But I think it's far more likely they will spend a lot of time trying to re-imagine the Bush years. And by simply repeating falsehoods over and over again, they'll manage to force them into the mainstream consciousness (as they always do).

For example, witness what happened with Reagen's legacy, as described by Noam Chomsky:

"During his years in office, Reagan was not particularly popular. Gallup just published poll figures comparing him during office with other Presidents. His average ratings during his years in office were below Kennedy, Johnson, Bush I, and Clinton; above Nixon, Ford, Carter. This is averages during their terms in office. By 1992 he was ranked just next to Nixon as the most unpopular living ex-president. Since then there has been an immense PR campaign to convert him into a revered and historic figure, if not semi-divine, and it's doubtless had an effect, radically shifting the rankings. Not on the basis of facts: rather, extremely effective marketing. The current performance is reminiscent of the death of Hirohito and Soviet leaders. One of the more depraved moments of US media. The lying is quite impressive, even by people who surely know better."

I don't suspect they'll have quite as much success with Bush's legacy, but they'll definitely push it for all it's worth.

What's been quietly happening with how we remember the Vietnam War might give us some indication of what to expect.
If you like reading a lot of old stuff (like I do) you know that at the height of the Vietnam War the general public was very concerned about issues like the napalm bombing of villages, massacres of Vietnamese civilians, bombing villages in Laos and Cambodia, saturation bombing in the North, et cetera.

These issues have all been swept under the rug the last few years. The Vietnam War is not presented as a high point of US foreign policy, but it's taught in schools as an idealistic, but misguided, effort to help the Vietnamese people. The average person in my generation (or younger) doesn't know what the My Lai Massacre or the Pentagon Papers were.

In fact, the political climate has changed so much, that in the 2004 election John Kerry was forced to apologize for speaking out against the Vietnam War 30 years earlier.

In the same way, the average American doesn't know anything about the Philippines War from the turn of the last century. This is another one of those embarrassing Imperialistic ventures that we quietly sweep under the rug and choose not to teach to our children. In another 100 years, maybe the Vietnam War will quietly disappear from the high school history books. And in 150 years, the Iraq War might do the same.

And Bush will perhaps become the next James Buchanan--widely regarded among academic historians as the worst President ever, but almost completely unknown to the general public.

Link of the Day
This lecture by Chomsky on "Free Market Fantasies: Capitalism in the Real World" is about 10 years old, but very relevant to what is going on now.