Recently, Mr. Bush has been allowed to rehabilitate his image, particularly on Reddit. My belief is that this is happening because of younger generations commenting in a contrarian way on his presidency, perhaps some of which is influenced by the absolute state of the Republican Party today.

For most of those of us who lived through his presidency, it was always clear that Bush was a religious and sexual bigot, but not a racial one.

It was always clear that the evidence for invading Iraq was scant at best. The war was protested by the biggest international collaboration of protesters ever.

Days after 9/11, there were plenty of us ACLU types decrying the USA PATRIOT Act. Many of us felt that Pelosi, Clinton, etc. had few inviolable beliefs about civil rights at that time. Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders voted against it.

Bush was the worst possible president, so I had thought.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    He also actively rejected reality in his Presidency, making a direct line ( with a Sharpie, no doubt) to today’s “alternative facts”. He wasn’t the first politician to lie, of course, nor to make people believe the lies. But his administration was totally open about what they were doing, and how it’s all OK.

    There’s a famous article Ron Suskind wrote for the NYT Magazine 20 years ago, summarized here. The key bit is this quote from an anonymous Bush WH official widely rumored to be Karl Rove:

    The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.

    The full piece is here:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html

    And is worth a read if you have NYT access and have forgotten (or are too young to remember) what the GWB Presidency was like. The article spends even more time discussing the faith-based certainty Bush used to construct his new realities. We all know Trump has no faith in anything but himself, but you can see Trump using the same tools to bring the same voting base along with him.