The wonderfully funny and awful legacy of George W. Bush

His mom says, "Enuf already!" 

"There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes." ...NYT

That comes from Barbara Bush per Maureen Dowd.  Even though Jeb Bush is supposedly standing on the doorstep of the White House.

Dowd writes in the Times that, to be fair, Mrs. B. thinks the same holds for the other clans -- including the Kennedys,  the Bidens, the Clintons.  Though of course Hillary is, in our reluctantly updated America, a Rodham.  And I'd hate to rule out either Malia or Sasha.

Dowd doesn't mention the Cheneys in  this context.   Mind you, Dick Cheney, beloved of the gun party, has a reputation for shooting friends in the face.  So maybe a mental health check would be in order for any Cheney running for office and for anyone who'd actually vote for him her.

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Okay, I should apologize for turning Bush family thing into a joke.  Face it -- the Bush family thing is a serious disaster.  Or, at the very least, what George W. Bush did to America is a disaster, starting with his 2000 campaign (a scary moment  for democracy) to his venal presidency (possibly the beginning of the end for democracy).  So okay, enough with the foam.  Paul Krugman has the last best word:  it's about the lies.

... It does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out.

From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair.

But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover.

Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, both of which continue to cast long shadows over our nation’s destiny. The key thing to remember is that both were sold with lies. ...Paul Krugman, Economics and Politics

Scary.  But here's the scariest part:  those lies were accepted as truth -- and continue to be accepted as truth -- by millions of Americans who call themselves "conservatives."  Now what do we do?