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In 2008, I wouldn’t have believed that a dozen years later I would have to explain to liberals that George W. Bush’s presidency was a parade of horrors and that he should not be looked upon with any amount of nostalgia.

Throughout the Trump presidency, we have seen numerous examples of establishment Democrats praising George W. Bush or even wishing he were president again.

The latest incident of Bush-related amnesia occurred after he announced the publication of a book containing portraits of new immigrants to this country. Doodles are now part of an effort to erase the failures of an administration whose track record was so horrible that the former president was not even welcome at Mitt Romney’s Republican convention.

The history of his administration is forever tied to its bloodlust for the war in Iraq — a criminal foreign policy failure that killed hundreds of thousands and created destabilization that continues to have ramifications throughout the region for decades to come.

It wasn’t simply Bush’s decision to go to war, but the climate his administration created here at home — where those who questioned this foreign policy blunder were, in today’s parlance, “canceled,” sometimes literally.

Going to war in Iraq was only the beginning. Once the invasion was complete, the occupation of Iraq demonstrated that the Bush administration was as incapable of governing as Donald Trump’s. This mishandling of the war was so bad that, by 2006, even the neocons who backed the war were becoming critical of the administration.

Kenneth Adelman, a member of Bush’s Defense Policy Board who said the invasion would be a “cake walk,” said, “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.” He continued, “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”

This incompetence was further put on display after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA head Michael Brown’s prior experience was that he was an official at the International Arabian Horse Association who happened to be friends with Bush’s 2000 campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.

At the height of his failure, with New Orleans underwater, George W. Bush praised “Brownie” saying he had done “a heck of a job.”

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