Washington, Lincoln, Bush
Here's a desirable "learning outcome" for first grade students in the public schools of Georgia: being able to answer the question, "How are Washington, Lincoln, and Bush alike?" In their classrooms, Georgia's 6-year-olds "will compare and contrast information about Washington, Lincoln, and our current president. This information will be recorded on a Venn diagram."
I don't know how many other states require this Venn diagram to be created, or whether first-grade teachers will accept -- as information for the place where the three presidents' circles overlap -- commonalities like not having gills, possessing opposable thumbs, or putting on their pants one leg at a time.
But I do know that George Bush loves to say what he has in common with Washington and Lincoln: how little it matters what people say about him today. "I don't think you'll really get the full history of the Bush administration until long after I'm gone. I tell people I'm reading books on George Washington, and they're still analyzing his presidency," he told 60 Minutes. At Camp David, he told ABC's Charlie Gibson, "I tell people I read three books on Washington last year, and if they're still writing on the first guy, the 43rd guy isn't going to be around to see it... I spent a lotta time reading about Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln had no earthly idea that the Gettysburg Address was a great speech.... You know, history, it's just, it, I, I've always felt that there needs to be a long leash to history. That you can't judge an administration, immediately. And, particularly one that has pushed hard for some big ideas, like, like, my administration has done."
Ah, yes, those big Bushie ideas. Tax cuts in wartime, the unitary executive, signing statements, waterboarding, gay-baiting... You can almost imagine a first grade exercise that teaches them. Put a circle around the ones that don't belong:
A. American Revolution.
B. Civil War.
C. Iraq War.
A. Beware the baneful effects of the spirit of party.
B. The party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty.
C. Democrats are terrorist-loving cut-and-runners.
Bush, of course, takes the long view of his place in presidential history. No one who saw this fly-boy swagger beneath the "Mission Accomplished" banner (on the USS Abraham Lincoln, no less) is qualified to characterize that act as one of the most loathsome, preening, hubristic degradations of the presidency in all of American history because... well, because none of us is dead yet! It'll take a hundred years, and a hundred books, before people have the perspective needed to acclaim his guitar-strumming indifference to Katrina as just what our glorious Republic needed from its POTUS at the time. His flying back from a Crawford for a midnight signing of the Terry Schaivo bill? Why, the only presidential historians who can call that one correctly (a victory for the rights of the undead? a miracle of long-distance diagnosis?) will be the great-great-grandchildren of kids in first grade right now.
I have no difficulty imagining the future historians who will rank W right up there along with the Father of Our Country and Honest Abe, rather than way down there with Warren Harding and Franklin Pierce. After all, the servile savants already beatifying Bush on Fox News, right wing talk radio, and in The Washington Times are as likely to pass their genes and memes down to future generations as is slime mold, and the Snopes clan that inherits the earth in Faulkner's dark vision. And as someone who lived through the Nixon terms, and then the Nixon funeral, and the Reagan terms, and then the Reagan funeral, I'm all too familiar with the press's fondness for the revisionist airbrush. De mortuis nil nisi bonum: speak only good of the dead.
The thing I'm having trouble imagining, though, is the scenario for America's future that George W. Bush thinks will ultimately make him look good. Does he really believe that future historians will look back at his Middle East record as the happy tipping point between radical-fundamentalist-jihadist-extremism and freedom-is-on-the-march? Or does he secretly hope that the tragedy looming in that region's future will be blamed not on him, but on his successors who inherit his broken crockery? Can he really imagine that his contempt for checks and balances, and for the Bill of Rights, will one day be compared favorably to Lincoln's boldness in saving the Union? Or does he believe deep down that the fact he ended up not being impeached will in the long view of history more than outweigh any pesky lefty aspersions about his abuses of power?
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan
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Thankfully a few Americans can still read and think. They recognize and understand the huge dimensions of the national tragedy that is the presidency of GWB. To what depths has the noble American ideal fallen? Ignorance is fostered, manipulated, and used to erase the U.S. Constitution and all of the potential this great democracy once held. Can we wrest it back from these crooks and their cronies?
Thank you, Marty for a spirited rejoinder to those who would let GWB off the hook now because they hope that somehow (maybe under the gestapo regime they envision?) the wreckage inflicted by GWB will be "excused" by the corrupt (or ignorant) mouthpieces who tout themselves as honest commentators. We must all speak out against what is happening to our present, our future, and even our history.
Well said. We cannot just move on to the next stage of our history without processing what has just transpired. This country has been taken over by a small clique of men and women who drape themselves in the flag, who have virtually no capacity for empathy and who glee and gloat over their victories. "Victory," you may recall, was referred to and invoked repeatley by Hitler and his henchmen and the idea of it filled them with a sense of gladness and well-being. Bush, similarly enthralled with the idea of Victory, went on his Victory Tour in 2003 or 4, repeatedly referring to Victory in Iraq.
I don't know what people will think of W in 100 years, but I know what W thinks about Americans right now. He hates us. He must. What other reason is there for his dismal record. he committed us to a war that we did not need to fight. he has botched the war that we did need to fight. He squandered the good will of the people of the world after 9/11. He spent much of his Presidency scaring Middle America. he has decimated the greatest military force in the world by abusing his power. He has allowed millions of jobs to disappear overseas. He has stood by and watched as the American Dollar lost value. He stands by as more Americans than ever are losing jobs. He has stood by while our education system struggles with his unfunded mandates. He demands accountability when he offers none. When many Americans began to lose their homes because of bad banking procedures, he let the people suffer while bailing out the banks. He oversaw the destruction of our judicial system through failed ideology rather than reason and logic. There's more. Katrina, the Kansas tornadoes, California wildfires. Just look it up.
It's clear, Bush hates Americans.
Marty, pleeeeeze! You say: "I have no difficulty imagining the future historians who will rank W right up there along with the Father of Our Country and Honest Abe, rather than way down there with Warren Harding and Franklin Pierce."
Franklin Pierce was my great, great uncle. No way was he half so bad as Arbusto!
sure, Bush is a "moron" and an "idiot", but so is anyone working in an occupation in which they have no experience. i get tired of reading those quantifiers used to describe the man. we knew that about him when the Supreme Court put him in charge. by now he should just be called an incompetent war criminal.
How about "psychosoc
The cheerleader in chief who in 2 tries dide'nt win the popular vote, takes a long view of WHAT????? it's simply amazing and i'm proud to say that georgie is the man! how can he not be? he don't know what the hell he's talking bout and is still standing..
What Washington and Lincoln did not have was a media that could record their image, voice and tone. I find it hard to imagine that all of the digital record of the Monkey could be altered to make him look good to future
population
Nixon was around a while ago, yet I don't see people adoring him posthumously.
History will judge Bush by his accomplishments, or lack thereof.
It's easy for Bush to use cliches about Washington and Lincoln, but unlike him they lacked the hubris and incompetence that will follow him into eternity.
Also, unlike Washington and Lincoln, today we have video and mass media accounts that will last forever. Presidential researchers 100 years from now will be able to see Bush in action, and I'm sure they won't one day call the Iraq quagmire (and other failures) anything but what they were.
If we were to be grateful to the Internet for one thing, it may be that "we, the people" now have a pretty good shot at leaving a better trail for future historians to follow.
Hey, there are some things that need to get done in this Land than impeaching a fool. I'll leave Bush, Cheney and Blair for the United Nations to prosecute. And then we can ask the terrorist, "Who else do you want in jail, in order to stop the killing?
De mortuis nil nisi bonum: speak only good of the dead.
I like Moms Mabley's version of that one: "You're supposed to say something good about the dead. He's dead. Good." One day we'll be able to say that about W.
According to Bush, Lincoln had no earthly idea that his Gettysburg speech would stand the test of time. Really?
At Gettysburg on November 18, 1964, Edward Everett the famed orator spoke for close to two hours while Lincoln took only a couple of minutes. Afterwards, Everett took Lincoln's hand and said: 'My speech will soon be forgotten; yours never will be. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your twenty lines.'
Well George I suppose old Abe did no understand what was being said to him by Everett. Nice try George, but no cigar or pretzel.
Everett took Lincoln's hand and said: 'My speech will soon be forgotten; yours never will be. How gladly would I exchange my hundred pages for your twenty lines.'
__________
When I was in highschool, we were asked to memorize the Gettysburg and repeat it from memory.
Whether or not this is a worthwhile exercise for highschool students, can you imagine any future highschool student being asked to recite one of George W. Bush's speeches from memory?
I think the fact that Lincoln wrote it himself should count for something. All Bush and his ilk (democratic pols included) can do is read what is put before them. And Bush can barely accomplish that.
I think he's the first president in history who actually giggles.
Giggling in the face of horror even. Remember his famous WWIII speech? Inappropriate expressions of humor is a sign of insanity.
Unless President Cheney (Jan. 19, 2009--Jan. 20, 2009) pardons Dubya, the ex-con will find it difficult to resurect his reputation.
He'll only get glowing reviews if we let him. ..but i really rather doubt he'll be all that fondly remembered even a few short years from now. Years in which we're constantly reminded that we no longer have super power status, our economy is in shambles, and our all the hard hard work we have to do to get our global respect back to even half of what is was 8 yrs ago.
OH, and part of those historians speaking of Bush will be foreign ones, and they aren't likely to be positive.
Besides, Bush IS an important presidency. This was one of the last gasps from a dying age. We already are dead as a superpower and these are the folks that desperately wanted to hold power and to get it back at any costs. They failed miserably.
Thanks for my Monday morning laugh:-)
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