George Bush, still President, is engaging in a legacy tour of media outlets. This comes despite his earlier having said he did not know how history would judge the Iraq war "because we'll all be dead."
Actually, many people are already dead because of Bush, and that is the point to keep in mind when he talks about his legacy.
Among the themes Bush is striking are that through action at home and fighting "them" over there, not over here, his administration stopped terrorist attacks and prevented another 9/11. There is a surface plausibility to those claims, as there has often been with the messaging served up by the Karl Rove spin machine. But let's look beneath the surface of the assertions.
Bush stopped terrorist attacks? Yes, some of the many alleged plots cited by the White House probably would have matured into attacks had not the U.S. intelligence community acted. Many were more aspirational than operational, and others were the pure inventions of FBI informants. (In the Miami Liberty City case, an FBI informant apparently bribed people who previously had no interest in Al Qaeda. When they swore the oath to Osama Bin Laden, they were then arrested for doing so.)
To hear a mouth-agape conservative spout that pathetic line of "we haven't been attacked since...." is something truly telling of the conservative-republican movement.
Whereas certain moments in a person's life can be seen in a realistic, linear fashion ( ie: I didn't screw that guy after the senior prom, and my best friend did and she got crabs that would have surely infested me ). To use this logic in relation to terrorism is utterly laughable.
To say that Bush has protected us is like saying that if you wear purple socks for a month straight and you aren't diagnosed with cancer, then purple socks obviously prevent cancer.
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