Saturday, January 17, 2009

Juan Cole's Farewell to W

Juan Cole does an amazing job encapsulating most of what should be remembered in this very well stated send-off to George W. Bush. One of the more important passages is directed at the Bush apologists who thinks W. can now get a pass on Iraq:

There are weasels among the pundits who say that
Bush has been vindicated, insofar as Iraq has regained better security
than it had in 2006. This is like saying that the Norwegian brown rat
was vindicated when the Black Death ran its course, having killed a
third of Europe before it subsided.

Bush has not redeemed the
Vietnam War but rather made us live through something very like it all
over again, the only difference being that this time we are likely to
have the sense to get out before we are thrown out.

But what we must always remember about the humiliating embarrassment that was the presidency of the spoiled, rich, frat-boy George W. Bush, is that he ran this country like he ran everything else he helmed, into the ground.

Bush never escaped the habits of his
ne'er-do-well undergraduate days at Yale. In the end, he replaced being
drunk on beer with being drunk on power. He replaced wooing the women
with wooing the corporations. He replaced frat boy hijinks with ruinous
wars that wrought a devastation across the rugged expanse of West Asia
unlike anything seen since the pagan Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258.

Our nation renews itself, and makes small revolutions with its political
campaigns. We have the opportunity now, to choose truth over
propaganda, responsibility over recklessness, compassion over
brutality, altruism over self-interest, and ability over incompetence.
We have the opportunity to repudiate the past 8 years, and to transcend
them once and for all, to redeem ourselves as a nation. The persons we
choose to serve us as first among equals in our republic can bring us
shame or honor as a nation. But it is our choices as individuals that
make us shameful or honorable in ourselves. We must never again allow a
crew of crooked bullies to make us underlings, lest we be laid to rest
in dishonorable graves.


I hope W. fades away faster than Nixon did. The only news I ever want to hear of that sorry bastard is that he's been convicted of war crimes, and will meet justice accordingly.

We could all be so lucky.

(thanks Shan!)

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