Eugene Robinson: Bush’s Short View of History

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090112_eugene_robinson_bush_history/

Bush’s Short View of History
Posted on Jan 12, 2009
By Eugene Robinson


Not to kick the president on his way out the door, but he was wrong when he told White House reporters at a wistful, nostalgic news conference on Monday that “there is no such thing as short-term history.” It’s true that some presidencies look different after a few decades. But it’s also true that presidential acts can have immediate consequences—and that George W. Bush will leave office next week as a president whose eight years in office are widely seen as a nadir from which it will take years to recover.

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In what may turn out to have been his last news conference as president, Bush spent surprisingly little time on his actual achievements. Yes, I said achievements. Bush was the first U.S. president to put real money and serious effort into a campaign against AIDS in Africa. Even if the administration wastes far too much on questionably effective “abstinence only” programs, the fact is that millions of people in Africa are being kept alive and relatively healthy with antiretroviral drugs that wouldn’t have been available without Bush’s funding and commitment. In sub-Saharan Africa, he made a difference.

Bush also tried his best to move his party away from small-minded xenophobia on the immigration issue. This doesn’t really count as an achievement, since Bush never got a reasonable immigration bill passed. But short-term history has proved him right. Latino voters defected to the Democrats in such numbers that the Republican Party looks even more like a country club than when Bush took office, and that’s saying something.

As his greatest achievement, Bush would cite the fact that there has been no terrorist attack on U.S. soil—I won’t use Bush’s unfortunate term, “the homeland,” which sounds vaguely Teutonic and evokes lederhosen—since the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida atrocities. Here, though, he relies entirely on short-term history. His argument, in effect, is that since we’ve made it through seven years and four months without an attack, his administration’s anti-terrorism methods must be both necessary and effective.

That must be a comforting thought for the president, but it’s unjustified. The fact that there has been no new attack does not justify waterboarding, Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons or domestic surveillance. Bush believes these departures from American values and traditions were necessary, but from what we know so far, they look more like overkill—an excess of cruelty and a disdain for the rule of law that have seriously damaged this nation’s sense of itself.

What we know so far isn’t enough. I understand Obama’s reluctance to conduct criminal investigations of the Bush years—and I realize that Bush might well pardon everybody in advance anyway. But it’s important to convene an investigation and learn the truth, all of it, so that no president is tempted to take such liberties again. History, both short-term and long-term, will be grateful.


Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2009, Washington Post Writers Group

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