Bush Administration Rehabilitation Through Misinformation

Zandardad flagged me up this week's Frank Rich column I missed yesterday, and it's worth discussing Rich's take on the Karl Rove/Liz Cheney puppet show designed to make America forget about the Bush Administration and blame everything, quite literally, on the Dems.

THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.

Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.

But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.

Everything that went wrong in Bush's first six years was retroactively Clinton's fault, and everything that went wrong in the last two was the fault of Senator Obama and the Dems because they controlled Congress.  Bush was the best President since Reagan, you see.  This has been going on since Obama took office, frankly.  The Clinton blaming after all did get Bush a second term, albeit barely.  But it also assured that the Dems would win and have to take responsibility for cleaning up the mess left behind.

The Republicans really do hope you're stupid enough to put them back in power in 2010 so they can get back to doing the things that created two wars and a financial disaster that drained trillions of dollars from our coffers, trillions of dollars we didn't have.  Obama hasn't fixed all the problems the Republicans left him, so the GOP argument is that after giving the Dems two years, it's time for another sixteen of Republican rule.

Do you really want these jackasses back in charge?  They're not sorry for their mistakes.  They're pinning them on Obama.  They will repeat them as soon as they are given a chance.