How is your memory? Are you of an age where certain past events are long gone and foggy? Maybe you’re too young to worry about that yet; your base of experience is still being formed. This past weekend, anyone with a clear memory stretching back twenty years or so, 2001, or maybe just back to 2009, twelve years ago, you may have noticed some extraordinary changes associated with the person of George W. Bush, former President of the United States.
When George left office in 2009, it’s hard to convey just how reviled he was. By many measures, he was a successful President which is half of why he was reviled. In his first term at least, he was unstoppable. He was generally well regarded early in his presidency for his handling of the 9/11 crisis. Then and for at least a couple years afterward, he acted in accordance with a rare broad public consensus to face and punish Al-Qaeda. We now know that devolved into a generation long detour in Iraq and into ‘nation-building’ both there and in Afghanistan. He exceeded the public mandate received after 9-11. Those details are 20/20 hindsight. Very few people knew what a ‘neocon’ was back in the early 2000s. George Bush did though, and now we know as well.
To see George Bush now (to include the recent Trump years), we don’t recognize him anymore. In his ‘9/11’ speech in Shanksville PA on Saturday, we listened to him throw innuendo at the Trump constituency.
“There’s little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard of human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Why so coy George? In the context of other remarks made over the past few years, these statements are widely regarded to draw equivalencies between protesting the election with a few that entered the capital, and then demonizing the whole lot as somehow equivalent to the Taliban, the same Taliban that hosted the hijackers that pulled off 9-11 on his watch. You don’t have to be very prescient to understand both the irony and disgust of such statements.
He didn’t call on Nancy Pelosi to lay down her dictatorial grip on the House of Representatives, nor BLMs race hustling segregationist blackmail, nor antifas riots and destruction of federal property. “Distain for pluralism”. Maybe he has profound amnesia himself about the highly divisive legacy of his successor, Barack Obama. That realization seems to have disappeared the more he made acquaintance with Michelle Obama. Maybe he somehow realized he had so much more in common with her and her Marxist roots than with the lowly 70+ million people that voted for Trump such that Bush is now soulmate to the Obama’s and Clinton’s. Or maybe Bush himself is just another Obama trophy. Maybe the brand of Republican ‘conservatism’ that George embraced was after all, nothing more that Brahman caste elitism, the flip sided coin to the Obamas.
The other telling change is that the progressive Obama/Clinton dynasties with all of their sprawling roots and branches into Big Media, Big Business, and leftist academia, all of the ones that so virulently hated on Bush, loudly baying and mocking as he left the Oval Office, they are now silent. This is extraordinary. The transformation of George W Bush is now complete, thirty pieces of silver and all.