Keith Olbermann joined the growing chorus of Democrats engaging in George W. Bush apologism this week during an appearance on the View.
Olbermann argued that both Bush and Pence would be preferable to Trump, as he “doesn’t think the guy is stable.” Pence would come with his own set of radical dangers (see the New Yorker: "The Danger of President Pence"). Pence is particularly dangerous to the LGBT community.
But let’s focus on Bush, another enemy of LGBT rights. The majority of Democrats seem to agree with Mr. Olbermann. In a recent Economist-YouGov survey, 51% of Democrats held a favorable view of former President Bush, while only 42% held a negative view. One speech critiquing Trump, it turns out, is all it takes for a war criminal to curry favor.
James Downie with the Washington Post chastised Democrats, telling them to "Stop Rehabilitating George W. Bush."
Bush’s record is one of the worst in American history. He and his administration helped facilitate the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. They misled the country into a war that cost tens of thousands of lives. They spied on Americans without warrants and violated legal prohibitions on torture. They botched the response to Hurricane Katrina, costing 1,800 lives while Bush talked about his FEMA director doing a “heckuva job.” They blew a budget surplus on tax cuts that failed to help the economy and exacerbated inequality. They gutted environmental regulations, distorted climate change science and lay down for companies to exploit natural resources at will. They exploited homophobia to drive up voter turnout. And in one of several scandals not out of place in the Trump administration, when it came to light that Bush’s Justice Department had fired nine U.S. attorneys for political reasons, Bush sheltered advisers under executive privilege. None of this deserves rehabilitation.
Vice mocked the results of the poll, in their article "Will Democrats like Trump in 2029? Probably."
I could spend the rest of my life shouting about why George W. Bush is bad, and why we shouldn't forget about him fibbing his way into a war that killed hundreds of thousands, his violently Islamophobic policies that paved the way for Donald Trump, and his secret scheme to wiretap Americans without warrants. But I guess I understand the impulse to retroactively endorse Bush—Trump is horrifyingly bad in way we've never seen before, and it can make the Bush years, during which the US had one of the worst economic collapses in its history, seem rosier. At least we didn't have Twitter back then, right?
But given this impulse for nostalgia, we're faced with a pretty awful future, one in which we all start reassessing Trump the same way so many have reassessed W. By 2029, when President Scott Adams signs a law requiring all kindergarten teachers to carry Dilbert-branded firearms, and Secretary of State Tim Allen decides that we should launch all of our nukes at the sun to fight global warming, a lot of former resistance members may feel softer toward Trump.
Perhaps they'll decide that his insidious tweets were actually kind of cute, or that at least he got a Goldman Sachs guy to run the National Economic Council instead of OJ Simpson. Compared to Secretary of Education Slenderman, Betsy DeVos seemed so nice.
Sure — Bush was more “stable.”
But Democrats seem to have forgotten rather quickly that there are half a million dead Iraqis as a result of George W., and that he paved the way for Trumpism. As much as you dislike Trump, it remains to be seen if his lack of stability will kill nearly as many people as George W. Bush killed.
The favorable rating for George W. Bush among Democrats should be closer to 0% than 50%. Unless Vice is right, and Democrats are destined to quickly forgive abhorrent behavior.
Let’s not let anti-Trumpism blind us to the tremendous evil committed by “gentler” conservatives like George W. Bush and Mike Pence. Let’s not let opposition to Trump’s personality blind us to the evils of neoconservative military policy, illegal surveillance, torture, and entrenched homophobia.