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UPDATED: Tear down the George W. Bush myth before it starts

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

UPDATE: Victory! That's one small step for a man...

As I write this, George W. Bush is saying goodbye to the White House press corps -- it's good to know that the Bush administration has finally successfully "liberated" someone, which is Bush himself, who is giving a performance for the ages, mugging for the cameras, finally joking about his former alcoholism and his mountain-bike escapes from the pressure. There was a lot to digest. A good chunk of his time was dedicated, not surprisingly, was defending his disastrous policies. He's still hailing "52 months of economic growth" -- hey, the business cycle will cycle up even under a bad president -- despite the statistics proving that Bush's two terms were the worst for job creation for a modern presidency, with the paltry 3 million jobs that were created in eight years after that was the annual average under Bill Clinton.

You know, it's easy to sit here on Jan. 12, 2009, and say that Bush is delusional, that of course Americans will remember that he was at times the most unpopular president of at least the last century, and that the cornerstone of his catastrophic legacy is that he invaded another country without just cause.

But don't be so sure of that. In fact, there are already worrisome signs that history may again accomplish what Bush and Dick Cheney pulled off so successfully in 2002 and 2003, which is conflating the invasion of Iraq with what Donald Rumsfeld might call "things related...not" -- al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack on the United States and the subsequent military action in Afghanistan.

When I say signs, I mean that literally. The picture at the top of this post is a portrait of Bush that was recently unveiled at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington (an excellent museum that, coincidentally, I visited for the first time over the recent holiday break.) In fact, I saw the Bush portrait along with the 41 other presidents (Cleveland twice, remember?) who came before him, but didn't realize that it was the first time the gallery displayed a president while he was still in office.

More importantly, I didn't dwell on the caption alongside it. It's a good thing that other people have -- especially the people at News Corpse, who produced this excellent report over the weekend, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who's on the case. The accompanying words say, in part, that Bush's presidency was:

"...marked by a series of catastrophic events," including "the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."

No, no, no, no, no! The attacks did not lead to war in Iraq -- what led to the war in Iraq was a scheme cooked up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to use the fear and the passions stirred up by a deadly attack on American soil and horribly abuse it for their own misguided geopolitical adventures. As Sanders said in explaining a letter he sent to gallery officials: