Last week the world witnessed the inauguration of a man who seems to possess the very qualities his predecessor lacked: integrity, intelligence, compassion, grace, class, empathy, etc. A man who, for so many across the country and around the world, has come to embody hope itself. Amidst all the festivities, the inaugural balls, the roaring crowds, it was easy to forget the man who is ultimately responsible for Obama’s victory: former President George W. Bush. This is not to say Obama did not “make it” on his own merits: charisma, intellect, extraordinary fundraising abilities, etc. However, this past election, which saw the first African-American president elected and lopsided Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, was more a primal scream against the last eight years of Republican rule.
We have come a very long way since Jan. 20, 2001.
Two knocked-down towers, one partially burnt Pentagon, 3,000-plus terrorist victims, one botched Afghan war, two failed captures of the world’s most wanted man, one botched Iraq War, one outed CIA agent, one smeared ambassador, 200,000 lost Iraqi army weapons, one disbanded Iraqi army, billions of lost dollars in Iraqi oil money, millions of displaced Iraqi families, one Abu Ghraib prison scandal, zero located weapons of mass destruction, 450,000 veterans denied VA health care, two vetoed G.I. Bills, 5 million “lost” White House e-mails, one Patriot Act, one wiretapping scandal, one financial monitoring scandal, eight fired U.S. Attorneys, one politicized Justice Department, one politicized N.S.A., 200 renditions of terror suspects, 1,200 illegally detained Muslim immigrants, one disobeyed Geneva Convention, one suspended habeas corpus, one disobeyed Presidential Records Act, 98 appointed lobbyists to regulate their own industries, 650 toxic chemicals with weakened regulation standards, one Crandall Canyon scandal, one attempt to sell America’s ports to unfriendly countries with terrorist ties, two extinct species of marine and terrestrial wildlife, one politicized EPA, one politicized FDA, one “Heckuva Job Brownie,” one Pat Tillman scandal (after the suspicious death of a celebrated U.S. soldier who was shot at close range in 2007, Bush refused to release internal White House documents concerning the matter to Congress), a $2,000 drop in median income, $1.2 trillion budget debt, $10 trillion overall debt, three-point rise in unemployment, six million additional Americans in poverty, seven million additional Americans without health care, one toxic goods from China scandal, one nuclear North Korea, 2,000 miles of Appalachian streams destroyed by unregulated mining, eight years and not enough room left on this column for the rest of the Bush Era scandals and screw ups …
And we have scored a significant victory over our racially-charged past with the election of President Obama. Let me take this moment to say thank you to former President Bush for being, as Chris Rock put it, “So bad he made it hard for the white guy to run for president.”