No seriously, I'm prepared to throw an axe if I hear these words one more time:
"He kept us safe."
This sentence is now the last refuge of the most die-hard supporters of George W. Bush to revise history and defend his terrible legacy. They represent the latest pathetic attempt from a dying breed to grasp at straws and pretend that our most recent ex-President will be judged kindly by history. I've heard way too many neo-conservative pundits utter them lately. Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Sean Hannity, Dick Cheney, and Bush himself, just to name a few.
And I'm sick of hearing them.
I mean, am I supposed to be impressed that since 9/11 we haven't experienced another major domestic terrorist attack? Does the right wing really want us to believe that because 2,000 people didn't die today in a horrible terrorist calamity, George Bush therefore did a bang-up job?
Yes, apparently they do. I didn't know that the mark of a good President was thousands of people not being blown up on American soil in a single day.
Look at it this way: Take an abusive husband and father. He gets drunk every night, then comes home and beats his wife and kids, innocent people who have suffered the pain and anguish under his hand for a long time and are too damn scared to go to the police. You and I and everybody else with a rational mind would rightly say this guy was a scumbag who should be hauled away. But wait a minute! His house hasn't been robbed in 10 years! What a FANTASTIC guy! I mean, he kept his house safe from invaders, right? Let's get him a trophy and a "World's Best Dad" mug!
Here's another example: A school bus driver, who's running a couple of minutes late, starts running red lights while driving recklessly at 120 mph. While on the way to school, he manages to hit mailboxes, fire hydrants, and other cars, but he somehow avoids causing any major injuries to other drivers, and all of the kids on the bus remain unharmed. Never mind that he endangered everyone on the road and on the bus; he sure kept those kids from dying. What a great driver! Let's make him superintendent!
Think these scenarios are too far-fetched? Here's one we've been hearing a lot about lately in the real world: A greedy, incompetent CEO of a major financial firm makes a series of awful decisions that runs his company into the ground and sends his stockholders' shares into a tailspin, causing an enormous financial ripple effect and contributing to an already worsening credit crisis. Oh, but he can't be such a bad guy! After all, he paid $1.2 million to refurbish his own office suite with such items like a 19th century credenza ($68,179) and a George IV chair ($18,468). He kept his company safe from the danger of modernized interior decorating!
If this all sounds ridiculous, it's because it is. Is the abusive husband a good dad because his house hasn't been burgled? No, he's an asshole and a criminal who just so happens to have a good home security system that keeps robbers away. Is the speed demon bus driver a responsible driver that can be trusted to keep your kids and other people on the road safe because he got to school on time? No, he's a maniac who never considered the safety of his children or the others on the road, and who was extremely lucky that nobody was killed. Was John Thain a responsible CEO of Merrill Lynch because he redecorated his office? No, he was an incompetent hack whose financial mismanagement led to $15.3 billion in losses for his company in the fourth quarter alone (but at least he was an incompetent hack with a taste for design!).
And getting back to the original point, it's the same twisted logic with the whole "George Bush kept us safe" meme. The right wing's entire house of cards, in this case, rests on whether or not you agree that the term "safe" simply means not getting attacked by Al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group in our own homes. So we haven't been attacked on American soil by terrorists since 9/11. Great. No, really. I'm very happy that a tragedy of that magnitude has not occurred since then, and will continue to hope that an event like that never happens again.
But there's a difference between avoiding a terrorist attack and being kept safe, a distinction that no rational person should ever ignore. George Bush recently said that there is good and evil in this world. I'm a firm believer that how a country confronts such evil says a lot about that country's character. And when you consider that America has now been forever tarnished with the ugly stain of torture in Guantanamo Bay, an economic calamity not seen since the Depression, a rapidly warming planet, a collapsing health care system, a city that was left to drown, and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the War on Terror.....then I'm sorry, but that doesn't smell like safety to me.
So enough of it. I'm sick of the media allowing pundits like Rove and Kristol to perpetuate the meme of "he kept us safe" and frame the debate in such a dishonest way. Not fucking up in one major area does not make you a success when you fuck up everything else in every other major area. I'm a young, healthy, 25-year-old male who's just trying to make a living on his own. I don't consider my day an absolute success just because I didn't get fired from my job, even if I acknowledge that I'm lucky to have a job in this market. And I'm not willing to let history define a President as a good President when his biggest accomplishment is "2,000 people didn't die all at once." So Armageddon didn't happen on January 19, 2009. Heckuva job, Bushie!
From now on, I demand that every reporter, TV news host, pundit, journalist, and writer require that if somebody says the words "Bush kept us safe," he or she must immediately cut the person off, add the word "but," then fill that person in about how the whole "he kept us safe" argument is a bridge to nowhere.
Your move, the media. Just know that if you think Bush kept us safe, my TV is not safe from me.
Sincerely,
A Rational Person With An Axe
Cross-posted at Talking Points Memo