George W. Bush: Someone Has Second Thoughts

     Krugman is critical of the push last week to rehabilitate Bush in the public mind.

     "I’ve been focused on economic policy lately, so I sort of missed the big push to rehabilitate Bush’s image; also, as a premature anti-Bushist who pointed out how terrible a president he was back when everyone else was praising him as a Great Leader, I’m kind of worn out on the subject.

But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out."

     "From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair."

     "But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.

     "Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies."

    "I suppose one could make an argument for the kind of tax cuts Bush rammed through — tax cuts that strongly favored the wealthy and significantly increased inequality. But we shouldn’t forget that Bush never admitted that his tax cuts did, in fact, favor the wealthy. Instead, his administration canceled the practice of making assessments of the distributional effects of tax changes, and in their selling of the cuts offered what amounted to an expert class in how to lie with statistics. Basically, every time the Bushies came out with a report, you knew that it was going to involve some kind of fraud, and the only question was which kind and where."

   "And no, this wasn’t standard practice before. Politics ain’t beanbag and all that, but the president as con man was a new character in American life."

   "Even more important, Bush lied us into war. Let’s repeat that: he lied us into war. I know, the apologists will say that “everyone” believed Saddam had WMD, but the truth is that even the category “WMD” was a con game, lumping together chemical weapons with nukes in an illegitimate way. And any appearance of an intelligence consensus before the invasion was manufactured: dissenting voices were suppressed, as anyone who was reading Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) knew at the time."

   "Why did the Bush administration want war? There probably wasn’t a single reason, but can we really doubt at this point that it was in part about wagging the dog? And right there you have something that should block Bush from redemption of any kind, ever: he misled us into a war that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people, and he did it in part for political reasons."

   "There was a time when Americans expected their leaders to be more or less truthful. Nobody expected them to be saints, but we thought we could trust them not to lie about fundamental matters. That time is now behind us — and it was Bush who did it."

     http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/the-great-degrader/

    I agree he was bad and he may have been the worst. On the other hand he's significantly to the Left of many Republicans currently in Congress and certainly to the Left of Romney during the election. 

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/with-george-w-bush-absence-makes-heart.html

   Bush was never one for self questioning, however, it's his Vice President who took the cake. He was a picture of pure arrogance in the Cheney documentary. Basically Cheney thinks he did the right thing and sees no reason to question if he could have been wrong about anything. 

   We are getting more information that underscores that Cheney really was Darth Vader and had an astonishing amount of power-totally unprecedented for a VP.. I have in mind in particular the new revelations about the secret War Council,, Greystone  led not by Bush but by Cheney-Bush was often deliberately kept out of the loop to keep plausible deniability-it's easier for him to deny something he really doesn't know anything about. 

     http://www.businessinsider.com/the-power-of-dick-cheney-in-dirty-wars-2013-4

     As I said in the link above, there are some things you can give Bush credit for-trying on immigration reform. Aids in Africa, and most importantly, apparently tuning out Cheney the last 2 years and ignoring Cheney's entreaties to pardon Scooter Libby. 

     However, it turns out someone is rethinking some things about the Bush Presidency, and she's a Republican: would you believe, Sandra Day O'Connor, the woman who made the Bush Administration possible in the first place. She now wonders if she and her fellow Supremes did the right thing:

      "Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor says she has second thoughts on whether the Supreme Court should have accepted Bush v. Gore -- the deeply controversial case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election."

     "It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor told the Chicago Tribune editorial board last Friday. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

     "In a 5-4 decision at the time, O'Connor voted with the four other Republican-appointed justices to shut down the recount in Florida, the decisive state in the election."

     "Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," the retired justice told the Tribune editorial board. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

     "O'Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice who retired in 2006, lamented that the case "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation." Legal expertshave noted that the Court has not cited the decision even once since it was made, which some interpret as a testament to its soundness."

     http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/justice-oconnor-maybe-bush-v-gore-was-mistake?ref=fpa

     Better late than never, I guess. Still if she could only have thought of We're not going to take it, goodbye 12 years ago. What a wonderful word this may have been.