This is how history is rewritten, folks: “Bush may have saved his own legacy,” Ross Douthat, comment, Anchorage Daily News 9-22-09.

According to Douthat’s logic, Iraq has not been completely and totally flushed down the toilet because the military “surge” “saved” George W. Bush’s wrong-country invasion legacy.

Never mind that it wasn’t only the “surge” that quieted down the war in Iraq but sheer exhaustion. It was Iraq’s Sunni insurgents who finally got tired of fighting both the Shiite majority and the heavily-armed American troops and decided to take our pay-off money and stop fighting.

Now that the more active warfare has (at least temporarily) abated in Iraq, that poor, devastated country is suffering from abnormally violent crime thanks to all the out-of-work insurgents. Their crimes are extremely brutal, featuring the beheading of child kidnap victims when the parents can‘t cough up a 100 grand in two days (“after years of violence, Iraqis are hit by frenzy of crime,” Anchorage Daily News 9-22-09).

Apparently, after eight years of Bush-onomics the American economy was not completely stuffed into the dumpster---so “last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout” was a “save” for George W. Bush? The President who inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and left us with a gaping hole in our economy after giving the country’s wealth away to the already rich is now credited with a last-minute “save“ in his economic bailout?

Nice “save,” George!

Apparently Bush did not screw up one-hundred percent totally. He only screwed up about 89 percent or thereabouts---so there’s a “legacy” in there somewhere.

The New York Times writer Douthat fails even to mention Afghanistan, which is now “Obama’s war” but was sure as heck bumbled from beginning to end by the Bumbler-in-chief that came just before---one George W. Bush.

And what about the environmental disaster of turning back the clock on mitigating global warming? Bush opened up some of the last wild places for a drilling and excavating, adding to the haze that already hung over the Planet. No “save” there.

No mention of Katrina and the willful neglect of allowing a great American city to be destroyed and sending in private militias with shotguns to keep Blacks from crossing bridges to safety. And sending in private contractors to erect high end housing and casinos so the Black folk don’t move back in to their ruined houses.

But hey, according to Ross Douthat, the conservative Republicans weren’t all that bad. Really. And Bush wasn’t all that conservative either but rather a “crypto-liberal.” Yeah, like some of my Christian friends are now saying of Bush: “He’s not a real Christian.” Hey, haven’t you heard about forgiveness, redemption and salvation? Isn’t that why people are Christian---to be “saved” from their sins.

Not to worry---the New York Times will save him. These days the present is being rewritten (or postponed) almost before it happens---why not rewrite the recent past? For an entire year---until the elections were over---the New York Times sat on Bush’s domestic wiretapping campaign to spy on Americans. Now that newspaper’s writer is papering over the ghastly legacy of the worst President of modern times (perhaps of all time). George W. Bush’s record is now getting a quick whitewash, a cheap makeover. Just be careful not to step in the “legacy.”

Rudy Wittshirk