Nostalgia For The Bad Old Days

Over at the NY Times, Stanley Fish asks if you miss George W. Bush yet.

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.

A perhaps more substantial sign incorporates a sign famous (or infamous) in the Bush presidency. The March 8 cover of Newsweek reproduces the famous 2003 photograph of Bush on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Lincoln. The president is in the left of the picture, striding away from the famous banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.”


Those words haunted Bush for the next five years, but now, Newsweek reports, they may play differently because — and this is emblazoned on the cover — we may have “Victory At Last.” It has to be said, declare the cover-story’s writers, that “now almost seven hellish years later . . . something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq”; and, they add (eerily echoing Bush’s words in 2003), this development “most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.”

Of course, one might disagree with that assessment, but the fact that it is made in the lead article of a major mainstream magazine tells its own story. It is a story that intersects with another, the story of the precipitous decline in Barack Obama’s support and of a growing suspicion, found on the left as well as on the right, where it is much more than a suspicion, that the politics of change may have been a slogan with less promise in its future than “Mission Accomplished.” (The imminent passage of a health care bill keeps being predicted, but so far no “victory at last.”) 

So after nearly eight years, Bush is vindicated because America may finally be getting out of the war of choice Bush joined in 2003, and after one year, Obama is the worst President even because he hasn't passed health care reform, unlike...all the other Presidents ahead of him, or something.  Got it.

Despite the sheer silliness of this particular exercise in mental masturbation, it does prove a point:  Bush cause so much lasting and permanent damage during his presidency and especially the last two years of his term that America wistfully pines away for the heady days of say, March 2001...before this country was sent down the chute to Hell.

Yeah folks, I've been saying for quite some time now that it was going to be a long, painful trek back to just where we were ten years ago financially.  There's enough damage here that some of it may never be fixed, at least not until another generation or so.  But miss Bush?  Really?

I don't think so. The effort to rehabilitate him at the expense of Obama will continue however, and the shallow like Fish lead the way.