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Sometimes as sure as things change, ironically, most often they remain the same. Let me explain, history is hardly ever written the way it actually occurred. Therefore, if that which I have witnessed and know to be true can be altered, no changed, how can I believe any recorded history. In fact, it is more like His-Story.
Case in point, this week our most recent President re-emerged into the public’s view with the launch a new book “Decision Points”. The B&N overview of the book bills it as “a groundbreaking new brand of presidential memoir, Decision Points will captivate supporters, surprise critics, and change perspectives on eight remarkable years in American history and on the man at the center of events.”
I am not sure exactly where it will be placed in your local book store; meaning will it be stocked under true crimes or fiction. Nonetheless, I am old enough and have lived long enough to have seen history made, told, rewritten, and changed to create a narrative that, frankly, fits the agenda. The agenda in this case is supposed to make us forget what we witnessed and know to be true concerning the last eight years in a way to be viewed as compassionate.
It’s understandable, especially as bad as the last eight years were that someone would want to attempt to rewrite this acrimonious history. Honestly, it was about as horrifying and deceitful as one can possibly imagine and yet no one complained as it occurred. At any rate the self proclaimed “Decider” has decided to justify why he was responsible, or not, for the worst period of life that I can remember.
To be fair, I have not read the book and doubt that I will, because I am not too big on fiction. However, I did see some of the interviews promoting the book, and read about it in the newspapers, and I think the interviews were good enough to be Oscar worthy.
While I watched the performance via the interview my thoughts were; would he admit that the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed him President? Would he explain how he allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy to push us to illegally invade a country that posed no threat to us costing over 800 billion and counting? Might the book contain an apology for the enormous cost in lives lost and permanent injuries not to mention the horrible conditions they returned to face at Walter Reed Army Hospital?
Oh, by the way, where’s Bin Laden?
To W’s credit, he does take responsibility for TARP and other Bailouts, which most accuse President Obama for initiating. This was a good thing particularly when a Pew Research Center poll found that nearly half of Americans hold the false belief that TARP was passed under President Obama, while only 34 percent knew it originated under Bush. To that the former president said, "Fifty percent of the people were wrong."
He would go on to defended his rationale for supporting TARP: "Do you adhere to your philosophy and say, let them all fail? . . . Or do you take taxpayers' money and inject it into the system in hopes that you prevent a depression? And I chose the latter."
Bush acknowledges that he undertook "the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt… helped spare the American people from an economic disaster of historic proportions." He defends the "automakers' rescue" with federal loans and those given to AIG as "basically a nationalization of America's largest insurance company." By Tea Party’s doctrine, that's heresy. But Bush, in "Decision Points," doesn't back off at all from his defense of the auto industry rescue and the federal ownership of financial companies - even though those positions today would make him a pariah in his own party.
He could have use the over 10 billion dollars in cash that just disappeared in Iraq to do some of this financing to pay the fat cats who played roulette on the global casino. Maybe he shares in the book why he gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks. Nor have I heard how sorry he is for the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades as he embraced devastating trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.
I was also wondering if he explained in this historical remake; how one can have a huge surplus when you took office, blow it, and leave office with the country trillion’s in debt. Was this what they mean by impact default? Did he mention the 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and account deficits as he borrowed more money from foreign sources than all the previous 42 Presidents combined? Maybe he was focused on the over 200,000 American Citizens who lost their lives because they had no health insurance on his watch.
This is the only president in recent memory that refused to attend or be a guest at any of the annual NAACP Conventions, or frankly do much of anything for the African American community. Except maybe having a few Negroes sprinkled throughout his administration, which was more like eye candy than substance – in my opinion.
What troubled me most was his admission that of all the bad things, horrors of his rule. The worst for him was a comment made by a rapper who said, “George Bush doesn’t like black people”. A comment made as a result of his response, or lack thereof, when he let a major US city, New Orleans, drown while patting his buddy Brownie on the back praising him for doing a “heck of a job”.
Of all the things – this is what he thought was the worst – not the hundreds of thousands died, injured, or wounded and their families suffering as a result of the two wars he started. THIS!!!
After that comment, I am not even going to touch on the outing of a covert CIA operative, the Patriot Act, illegally wiretaps, or torturing people. Oh, he didn’t catch Bin Laden did he?
The most telling statement from what I have gleaned was "I felt like the captain of a sinking ship" he writes in the memoir, adding: "This was one ugly way to end a presidency." So I guess we can say “Mission Accomplished”.
I searched the online book stores for its customer rating: 3 Stars
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