Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Bush: More Rethinking

I wrote a post about how I was rethinking Bush in light of the major right turn of the GOP. With Bush not even part of the Republican convention, I have more thoughts / questions.

My question is why the GOP is distancing themselves from him? Yes, he was and remains unpopular. Yet the things he is unpopular for are things the GOP still stands for. Bush is unpopular because of the recession and the Iraq War. But Mitt Romney's economic policies are more of the same from Bush and show he hasn't learned anything from the Great Recessions. And his foreign policy - specifically its belligerence towards Iran - shows he didn't learn any lessons from the Iraq War.

My best guess is that the GOP is distancing themselves from Bush because people might see the connection between the GOP platform and Bush (and might even realize the GOP is even more extreme than Bush was). But this is a party that seems to laugh in the face of unpopularity. I would have expected them to highlight Bush and try to say he was right about all of those things. That would be the honest thing to do. And the decent thing to do as well.

Instead, they are humiliating someone for having the audacity to implement policies the party still supports. 

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