Bush: I Don’t Care What History Thinks
Posted by gopinder on December 23, 2008
Some more disconcerting news from our outgoing president:
For a man on a bon voyage tour, Bush has tried to sound unconcerned about how history will judge him.
“I’ll be frank with you. I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history,” he told Gibson. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”
The line is an echo of his famous response to Bob Woodward’s question about how history would judge the Iraq war. Then, as now, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
Coming from someone with a Bachelor’s degree in History, this sounds a little strange. But really, this kind of approach towards governance – to be unafraid of how your administration will go down in the history books, is a telling sign of just how dangerous this president is. The cynical truth is that Bush may very well be gone before he can personally witness the effects of his Iraq policy on that country and the Middle East as a whole, but did he pursue the invasion of Iraq as a part of some personal short-term agenda, or as part of a bigger mission involving the security of the country over which he presides? We’ve been told to believe the latter, but these comments by Bush seem to imply otherwise. This selfish, insensitive, and cold manner of approaching his responsibilities as leader of the free world are not becoming of the office of the President and only remind us of just how asleep at the wheel Bush has been over the last eight years. While approval ratings, polling, and PR can bestow upon a politician a sense that he or she is doing right by his/her country, the true test, as I see it, belongs in the hands of the people who get to witness firsthand how certain policies play out generations later. Without this sort of deterrent of history, without the worry of how history will evaluate your presidency, the expectations are set pretty low, and, to quote a soon-to-be former president, if that’s not false bigotry, then I don’t know what is.
