Watching Obama’s inaugural celebration made me cringe for Bush. If I were him, I would have wanted the earth to swallow me up during Obama’s inaugural address. All the things that the black president mentioned as problems, the colorful president practically caused. Bush was a failure on several counts, but his worst blunder was betraying the American public. No wonder Obama’s promotional slant of taking care of the American people this time really flew.
Now, Obama will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He can pardon Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld for war crimes, and he’ll be damned by those who believe that this triumvirate is responsible for over 600,000 victims of a war. He can help for the trio to be indicted for such war crimes, and he’ll be damned by those who would want to remain insularly American.
The future generations of America will not fail to note the mind-boggling things that happened under the Bush administration: the total insult of America in 9/11, the gung-ho invasive occupation of Iraq, the despicable things that happened in Abu Ghraib wherein no amount of denial can erase the reputation of torture, stubbornness in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the failure in disaster management after Katrina, and the foreseen fall of the US economy. All these spelled the failure of Bush.
Many paint a lame alibi that Bush was merely influenced by the neocons, the so-called intellectual godfathers of the Iraq war. That makes him weak. The Bush aftermath is certainly miserable. For the man himself, he considers the invasion of Iraq as liberating Iraq or what he considers his greatest achievement as president. For people who still want to hang on to a semblance of belief in Bush, the only thing they can think of as the man’s greatest achievement is all the financial aid he gave Africa.
It is truly pathetic if Bush’s greatest achievement as US president is helping foreign countries – and not fellow Americans. Bush is a conspicuous stain in America’s purportedly hallowed history – blight to the American legacy. Unwittingly or purposely, Obama focused the world’s eyes on that stain within the span of a 20-minute speech.
