Legacy Costs
by digby
In your dreams:
"I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush told his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, in a conversation recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
I'm sure that would be nice, but instead you will be remembered as the man who invaded a country that hadn't threatened it using lies and propaganda --- and ended up "liberating" millions of people from their lives.
"I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a president that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them," he said
No, it wasn't a tough choice to invade Iraq or ignore Katrina or allow the financial system to run completely amuck. It was a unique combination of stupidity and malevolence, which will be studied for centuries by historians struggling to imagine how such a person was ever given such power by a supposedly democratic people.
I believe he did go to Washington with a certain set of values -- after all he'd signed over 150 death warrants without even reading the paperwork. That's exactly the kind of person who would legalize torture and suspend the constitution. And naturally a man who would steal an election and then govern like he'd won in a partisan landslide would politicize the Justice Department. Surely anyone who would hire a thug like Karl Rove could be expected to spy on Americans and use the presidency for political purposes.
Yes, his values are intact, no doubt about it, and his legacy is intact.