Welcome To The George W. Bush Presidential Library; Please Switch Off Your Brains

They opened up the George W. Bush Presidential Library the other day.

Is this a great country, or what?

Here's a guy who was without question a total disaster as President. And believe me, having lived through Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Elder, I have a fairly high threshold for disasters.

But Simple W. set the bar at a level that one hopes will never be approached again. Let us count the ways:

Asleep at the switch for 9-11 whilst cuddling up with his Saudi soul mates; dropped the ball on Bin Laden's pursuit at Tora Bora at the same time his administration was legitimizing torture; bait and switch war in Iraq that cost us more than a trillion dollars, not to mention all the death, dismemberment, and PTSD; turned a budget surplus into a huge deficit with his tax cuts; watched Wall Street run wild because he believed in the beauty of the unregulated "free market"; half-assed response to Katrina; wanted to privatize Social Security; shit all over the Constitution every chance he got..Jesus, the list goes on and on, but I'm starting to have flashbacks...

So anyway, because it's de rigueur for former Presidents, Incurious George gets himself a library. Keep in mind, this is a fella who probably hasn't read anything since My Pet Goat and very little before.

Now, there's a very good reason for this: Books are sometimes filled with facts, and facts can get messy. And since Bush's administration decided early on that they would create their own reality, it is only natural that the George W. Bush Presidential Library would be dedicated to the completely counter factual narrative that Bush was a great leader, a great President, and a great American.

Shortly after Obama was elected the first time, a billboard appeared by the highway in the desert near Yuma, Arizona. It featured  the beaming face of George W. Bush and the words "Do You Miss Me Yet?"

Of course the only sane answer to that would be "No, no we don't. Not now, not ever."

Fortunately for W. (and the Bush family in general), the American people have a tremendous capacity to forgive, but an even greater capacity to forget.