Yeah. Pretty Much.

One of the major legacies of the Bush/Cheney Administration to American Culture.  That, and massive debt, a nascent police state, and an eternal war footing.  Arguably the most catastrophic administration of my lifetime.  And the response of his Party?  Not admission, much less regret.  Just simple blank denial.  The convention last summer made it seem as though nobody had ever even heard of the guy.  That’s not how adults to confront the need for change.  And so 2016 looks like it’s shaping up to be a replay of 2012 for the Bourbon GOP.  No thanks.  Wake me when that party is capable of dealing with reality. Meanwhile, though I am not a Libertarian myself (I regard it as a philosophy for people with no children), I can totally respect A Conservative Blog For Peace’s analysis of the immense catastrophe that was George W. Bush:

Daniel Nichols sums up George W. Bush. This man left a trail of carnage and chaos. If there were any justice he and his cronies — or should I say “handlers” — would be in jail. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rowe, Wolfowitz, Pearle, and the rest of them set out to establish a Pax Americana and left two broken countries and a nation in economic collapse. The pundits who foresaw Iraqis greeting American troops with flowers, who told us the war would be a “cakewalk” still rake in the big bucks for their opinions. I wonder if it ever occurs to him that he is responsible for the deaths of God knows how many grandchildren of Afghans and Iraqis. In 2000, before 9/11 Changed Everything (the powers that be’s Reichstag fire?), when he sang a different, non-interventionist tune, so he seemed a serviceable alternative to the culture wars’ Great Satan who was then bombing Serbia for no good reason (hindsight: by dumb luck, being boxed in by a hostile Congress, he was functionally, unwillingly, the best conservative president in recent history, presiding over a boom; he was entertaining, too), I voted for him. I wonder how much of that old conservatism was sincere (over 20 years ago, Dick Cheney talked sense about these matters) or if it was a pose all along, from a family of Rockefeller Republicans (neocons are Wilsonian liberals who migrated to the GOP). The Project for a New American Century had the real plan up their sleeve. You can fool me only once. I never voted for a mainstream Republican again. (Like Murray Rothbard voting for Stevenson, in ’06 I was functionally a Democrat!) I’m a libertarian who votes for people like Ron Paul in Pennsylvania’s GOP primaries, the only reason besides abortion I’m a Republican on paper.

Me being stupid and slow, it took being fooled twice before it began to sink in that the GOP is a complete waste of time and a seductive menace for people serious about Catholic teaching (precisely because it’s easy to mistake it for a party that actually cares about abortion and not the lying manipulative, war-monger, mammon-worshipping thing it is).  But even a lunkhead like me can learn.  I will never vote for either of these parties again (unless, of course, they manage to field somebody who does not advocate grave intrinsic evil).  However, love for grave intrinsic evil is now pretty much a litmus test for both parties.  All that differs between them is which grave intrinsic evils you have to love in order to pass muster.  And one of these days, they will figure out a way to come to happy concord on supporting all grave intrinsic evils.

Meanwhile, I leave you to meditate on the curious fixation our former president seems to have with images about the need to be cleansed:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand?
No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red. – Macbeth