For my money, Bush the Lesser’s finest moment came in the aftermath of 9/11, when he said the appropriate response was to “go shopping”. That had it exactly right. Keep calm and carry on. Live the sort of normal, peaceful lives that made al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS jealous. Don’t let the terrorists terrorize us. Illegitimati non carborundum.
If only he’d had the courage of his (dubious) convictions and followed his own advice. But when he got back to the White House, Cheney started whispering in his ear, and it was all downhill from there. Gutting civil-service and union protections in the federal bureaucracy as part of a massive reorganization that gave us the TSA and many other assaults on our civil liberties. Ramped-up intrusiveness from the surveillance state. Color-coded anxiety provokers. Two multi-trillion dollar wars against the wrong enemies! (No, Saddam Hussein was not behind 9/11, and no, Osama bin Laden was not hiding out in Afghanistan.) Normalization of lying.
So yeah, there was a massive assault on the American way of life, but 99.9% of it came from within, and those supposedly “jealous of our liberties” must be rubbing their hands in glee to see what we’ve done to ourselves.
For my money, Bush the Lesser’s finest moment came in the aftermath of 9/11, when he said the appropriate response was to “go shopping”. That had it exactly right. Keep calm and carry on. Live the sort of normal, peaceful lives that made al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS jealous. Don’t let the terrorists terrorize us. Illegitimati non carborundum.
If only he’d had the courage of his (dubious) convictions and followed his own advice. But when he got back to the White House, Cheney started whispering in his ear, and it was all downhill from there. Gutting civil-service and union protections in the federal bureaucracy as part of a massive reorganization that gave us the TSA and many other assaults on our civil liberties. Ramped-up intrusiveness from the surveillance state. Color-coded anxiety provokers. Two multi-trillion dollar wars against the wrong enemies! (No, Saddam Hussein was not behind 9/11, and no, Osama bin Laden was not hiding out in Afghanistan.) Normalization of lying.
So yeah, there was a massive assault on the American way of life, but 99.9% of it came from within, and those supposedly “jealous of our liberties” must be rubbing their hands in glee to see what we’ve done to ourselves.