Update: What part of "fuck no" didn't you understand?

Do You Miss Him Yet? - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

This guy starts off from the point where we last left off in this asinine perspective: with a reference to the sign some numbnuts (or several of them) put up in Minnesota. He goes from bad to worse however, by implying that he gets "I told you so" rights. He thinks this is the case because, in the words of the Newsweek article he is basing his perspective on:

“now almost seven hellish years later . . . something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq”; and, they add (eerily echoing Bush’s words in 2003), this development “most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East.”

He believes his prediction is right because Iraq is having an "election," because there has been a drop in Obama's popularity (a standard post election slide, Bush's poll numbers were in the high 40's prior to 9/11/01) and because of Obama's endorsement of Bushesque policies:

Guantanamo hasn’t been closed. No Child Left Behind is being revised and perhaps improved, but not repealed. The banks are still engaging in their bad practices. Partisanship is worse than ever. Obama seems about to back away from the decision to try 9/11 defendants in civilian courts, a prospect that led the ACLU to run an ad in Sunday’s Times with the subheading “Change or more of the same?” Above that question is a series of photographs that shows Obama morphing into guess who — yes, that’s right, George W. Bush.

In other words, since his inauguration a little more than a year ago, Barack Obama has not fixed America or the world. Tsk. Tsk.

We have much to question in Obama's presidency and it is difficult to swallow some of the decisions that he has made, but there are many more decisions to admire.

• He has confronted partisanship head-on, in both his party and the other one. And do you really need to be reminded that the reason partisanship is as bad as it is is because the Republicans continue to practice the Atwater/Rove strategy of winning elections through scorched earth, fear driven and disparate minority coalition tactics that are focused on winning elections at all costs - even the good of the country or their own constituents?
• His budget has made an effort to address the crisis that we now face as well as to resolve two wars, and rehabilitate important structures that were allowed to wither on the vine by the Bush administration. One other minor point: one of the reasons Obama's budget looks the way it does is that he is actually including the cost of those two wars in the budget - something Bush administration never did.
• His foreign policy has gone a long way to repairing the damage done buy the Bush administration.
  
• Obama has appointed a largely honorable and effective cabinet of workers (including the retention of Robert Gates who has worked to end the antiquated cold war policies of the Bush administration) - as opposed to Bush's cabinet of CEOs.
  
• He has called for the end of the horrible "war on drugs"and has promised to end the ridiculous "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military.
  

I could go on, but I won't, because my point here is not to defend Obama. I am critical of many of the decisions he has made - not least his continuance of the attacks on civil rights started by the Bush administration. My point is that any ideas about returning to the days of the Bush administration or the "success" of his adventurism in the Middle East will be based on unalloyed revisionism.

And there will be revisionism about the Bush administration, the cited essay serves only to document the beginning of it.  It will be used as a way of promoting the myths of Republican leadership,  just as Reagan revisionism was used in the 2008 campaign.There is revisionism about every major historical person or event. Harry Truman was bad, but was "rehabilitated" by the administration of Bush 41.

The American public has a long history of ignorance about their own history and are easily deluded by a vast media array of almost continuous input. So I have no expectation but that W revisionism will be bought by the voters - this is what the whole Tea Party "movement" is about.

There is no doubt that people are unhappy, but what they are unhappy about is basically that Obama has not been able to undo the damage done by the Bush administration. The idea that people would want Bush back, or look back fondly on his administration is akin to the belief of a child seeking to escape the care of her stern grandmother by going back to her abusive father. It may seem like a good idea from a distance, but the reality would be far less than better.

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