how so many have tried to rehabilitate W's image. Admittedly, I'd take him and even CHENEY back in a heartbeat over whatever the fuck this is we have now, BUT...
Starting wars based on lies (that killed at minimum a hundred thousand people, many of them innocent civilians, drained our treasury/exploded the deficit and from which it took a generation to disentangle ourselves); exploiting our pain over 9/11 to massively erode our civil liberties at home (cough, cough, PNAC, anyone?); demolishing our reputation/standing on the world stage; allowing gun violence to become not just normalized but celebrated; practicing extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture; cramming our government full of unqualified cronies and religious bigots; appointing some of the WORST supreme court justices we've ever had (his REAL legacy); handing out our hard-earned tax money to every Monopoly man with a monocle who didn't need it while slashing our safety nets.
And he just got to fuck off and go paint dog pictures and never say a word to stand up against the twisting of his "party" into the lethal hate machine we see before us now. His administration (among others) never being held accountable is what led us here.
The man was simply a bumbling idiot who did whatever his Machiavellian handlers told him to do. The architects surrounding him began their evil plans during the Nixon and Reagan years, but really W's administration is when everything went into warp drive towards where we are now. Well, that and Newt Gingrich a few years before deciding that governing with civility and cooperation was for the birds.
My late husband and I talked often about creeping authoritarianism even back then and we didn't think it could ever get any worse...
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