G.W. Bush's Legacy

I've read that as these last 18 months of his occupation of the Oval Office begin, G.W. Bush has been worrying about his legacy. I've also read that to that end a bunch of scholars came to the White House to discuss the matter.

Both activities are such a waste of time that they would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Bush's decisions since taking over the Office have had such drastic consequences.

I don't know why anyone has to determine it, because his legacy has been as obvious as the nose on your face for several years, and he has reinforced it so much that now there's nothing that he or his supporters can do to brighten it.

Because they are so used to having friends that can control what the media puts out, G.W. Bush and his people can try to change the verdict, and I suppose that just such an attempt has been behind the efforts of David Horowitz and others to purge the universities of professors that do not see things the same way that the Regressives do. After all, the Horowitz's, in their support of the Bush regime, are guilty of complicity in that regime's crimes. But time has longer feet than do the would-be fixers of History's verdicts, and it is the tendency of historians to be more progressive than regressive. Progressivism and liberalism open windows and let light in. Conservatism likes to keep things dark, so that the nefarious doings of their junkyard dogs can't be seen.

I'm not aware of one thing the Bush time in office has done that can be called a real achievement, an act for the lasting bettering of things. I wonder what their supporters would put on such a list.

But we are all conscious, to mention just one thing -- there are many other misdeeds -- of the incredible misery that Bush's orders unleashed upon Iraq.

Years ago someone, I think one of the primetime networks, aired a documentary on the Second World War, which at that time hadn't been over very long. As I recall it focused on the campaigns in Europe and on the German role in them.

The main thing I remember about this program is that it had the most memorable ending of any documentary I've seen. It had the narrator saying something like, "Adolph Hitler died by his own hand in a bunker in Berlin, on April 30, 1945. He was 56 years old. If you seek his legacy, look around."

Then, without any other comment, the camera rolls over images of the seemingly endless, severely bombed-out remnants of the city of Nuremberg.

I wonder if any of Bush's scholarly guests dared or bothered to tell him that his legacy is similarly waiting in the hundreds of bombed-out ruins of Iraq, a legacy that he may not have realized he has now totally wrested out of the hands of a man who, before Bush "salvaged" him, had himself proceeded much on the model of Herr Shickelgruber: Saddam Hussein.