Why George W. Bush Went Down the Republicans' Memory Hole
From 2012.
Lyndon Johnson was so hated by a majority of Democratic Party activists in 1968 that he failed to appear at the national convention held in Chicago. There was no photograph of him anywhere. He became a non-person.
Yet he was the President of the United States.
George W. Bush has achieved the same unique status. He did not show up at the 2008 national convention. He did do a brief live video feed. Not this time. He will be a ghost at the Party’s party.
It was his decision in both cases. These were very wise decisions.
“President Bush was grateful for the invitation to the Republican National Convention,” a spokesman for Mr. Bush, Freddy Ford, said in a statement. “He supports Governor Romney and wants him to succeed. But in keeping with his desire to stay off the political stage at this point in the post-presidency, he respectfully declined the invitation to go to Tampa.”
He would no doubt deny the extent to which his legacy has destroyed the Republican Party. But he knows that he is not welcome to large segments of the Republican electorate. Some despise his legacy. Others are just deeply embarrassed by it.
He did not get Bin Laden.
He started a war that every foreign invader has lost: an invasion of Afghanistan.
In Iraq, there is no peace. The car bombings and the suicide bombings continue. The Shi’ite Muslims are in charge in the south. Their brethren in Iran are pleased.
He ran a huge budget deficit in 2008, with no effect, other than to set a precedent for Obama a few months later.
He bailed out the big banks, despite universal opposition from Democrats and Republicans in the electorate. He TARPed the voters.
He sat silent while Ben Bernanke doubled the monetary base in one month.
Obama won in 2008 with this promise: he would not be another Bush. He lied. He is Bush’s operational heir: big bank bailouts, huge budget deficits, war in Afghanistan, and Gitmo.
Pelosi rammed Obamacare through Congress. This followed up on Bush’s Medicare prescription drug law, which will cost the federal government far more than Obamacare will.
But Obama did get credit for killing Bin Laden.
Former Congressman Mickey Edwards has summarized Bush’s Presidency as well as anyone. He did this in a book published in the spring of 2008, before the economic crisis hit.
“At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the White House, the president, who called himself (and was called by others) a conservative, had become the very embodiment of everything conservatives had long feared and warned against. Operating almost unchecked by any other branch of government, he ordered wiretaps on citizens’ phones, held prisoners without trial or charges, and refused to provide information to Congress even when federal law required him to do so. For nearly half a century, conservatives had worried that a leftist president, if given the opportunity, might do such things. Now those things were being done by a man who called himself a ‘conservative,’ and ‘conservatives’ cheered him on. Those who once had wanted only that the government leave them alone as much as possible, who once had warned of the dangers of Big Brother, had created the monster government they most feared.”
I hope Bush stays away from the 2016 convention, too.
Continue reading here.
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Published July 23, 2012. The original is here.
He did not appear at the 2016 convention.
He remains invisible. His once-vocal supporters are content with this.
Bush campaigned on a vaguely conservative platform. He was certainly a non-imperialist when he was elected. Overnight on 9/11, he turned into an imperialist's imperialist. His conservative supporters did not criticize him. When a President is in power, he can get away with ideological murder, and most of those people who voted for him wink their eyes, cover their ears, or turn their heads. They do not want to admit that they had been sucked into supporting a sellout. But when he departs from the stage as a universally perceived loser, as Bush did because of the 2008 economic crisis, they drop him down the memory hole. They do not want to be reminded that they had been sucked in, and that they had been mute for four years or eight years. So, the applause that the President gets from his betrayed supporters, or at least the grudging acceptance, does him no good, once he has departed from the scene. The same thing happened to Jimmy Carter after Reagan defeated him. Liberals dropped him down the memory hole. He was perceived as a loser, which he clearly was, and they did not want to be associated with a loser.
Clinton and Obama went out on top, so they still get a free ride from liberals.
The power religion attracts fair weather friends.
He spends his days painting. His paintings are amateurish, but they are far better than his Presidency.