From The Guardian: This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destructionI'll have to force myself to resist the temptation to quote the whole devastating article. It's too shocking.Bush offers earthiness of a rather different kind, letting us accompany him as he walks the dog in Dallas shortly after he's left the White House: "Barney spotted our neighbor's lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years."...
There's more to such sentiment than Bush's own desire to see his reputation pulled out of the trash can in which it was dumped in January 2009, when he left office with the lowest presidential approval ratings on record. Nor is this a battle for history, whose verdict will be a long time coming: as Bush has joked, "I'm gonna be dead when they finally figure it out." This, like every discussion of the political past, is most emphatically about the present.
Until now the American right has dealt with Bush the way Stalin dealt with Trotsky – via the airbrush. Most Republicans have tried to vanish him from the record, avoiding the merest mention of his name. But that's not sustainable for ever.
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