Revisionist History - George W. Bush Edition

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Revisionist history is nothing new.  As they say the winners write history.  We saw it with Ronald Reagan.  Shortly after he left office the process began to white wash the negatives and invent positives.  He is giving credit for ending the cold war and bringing down the Soviet Union - not true.  The fact that he began the process of bringing down the US economy by destroying the middle class is white washed.  Now the revisionist history begins after George W. Bush has been out of office for almost a year.  It begins perhaps with Caroline Glick on the day the ground was broken on the Bush library.  She manages to miss GWB and do a hit piece on Obama at the same time.

It hurts to hear about an American President who cares deeply and sincerely about wounded soldiers and soldiers murdered in a terrorist attack and know that he is not the American President. It isn't so much that I miss Bush personally. I had a lot of criticism about his policies - particularly in his last two years in office after he effectively abdicated his leadership of global affairs to Condoleezza Rice and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington.

But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America's allies even if he didn't always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You can't say any of that about his successor. And it hurts. It hurts that Barack Hussein Obama's first statement about the massacre at Fort Hood was so emotionally cut off from what happened. It hurts that he thought the most important thing to say about the massacre is that we mustn't jump to conclusions about the motivations of the terrorist who killed his fellow soldiers despite the fact that he was screaming Allah Akhbar as he shot them. It hurts that Obama and his wife treat soldiers like losers who all suffer from PTSD and that the greatest service he can render them is to provide them with free psychiatric care and send them home from Iraq and Afghanistan without first securing victory.

I'm not going to comment on this offensive nonsense because Daniel Larison did a much better job than I could.

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush’s foreign policy were his worst), but it’s offensive all the same. As tempting and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the worst Presidents of all time, I don’t assume that Bush did any of the things he did because he didn’t have “American values” or didn’t love his country. I don’t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe, Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love. Bush’s problem wasn’t that he didn’t love America. The problem was that he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive, arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush’s love of country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another context “zeal not according to knowledge.” The man was actually overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid, jealous lovers, not more.

I think even Larison is giving Bush too much credit.  He was an incompetent power hungry sociopath.  He didn't love this country he only loved himself.  Bush was a C-Street president who was convinced that he had been chosen by God. 

Comments

[John Ballard]

...losers who all suffer from PTSD.

This gave me a flashback to the scene in Patton where he slaps and insults the soldier under his command obviously suffering from PTSD. Very revealing turn of phrase. The military has come a long way since then (thankfully) even if the writer has not.

[geoff]

The rewriting of the past is what I expect, everyone loves their own particular myths. Though I suspect that the view of Bush 43 won't be able to be engineered into being a glorious leader no matter how it is spun.

As per nothing in particular a link to an article on the past:

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/11/past-benjamin-future-obama