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.
I disagree. Yes, Cheney and Rumsfeld et al. played their part and enriched themselves by driving the country to war, but Bush was in charge and part of it all, not a puppet. He’s dumb in many senses but still evil. And Trump golfed more than Bush and I wouldn’t excuse his culpability in any of his admins actions because of that. He made those calls.