Rove/Cheney Revisionism

The New Rove-Cheney Assault On Reality - Frank Rich, New York Times

Karl Rove, Dick and Liz Cheney, and William Kristol are using historical revisionism to burnish the sullied reputation of the Bush administration. According to Rich:

To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture. 

Of Rove's new memoir, Rich says: "This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington."

Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.” 

Dick and Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol have launched a new organization called Keep America Safe:

Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn. 

The revisionism with respect to the Bush administration has jumped into high gear with the death of Osama bin Laden. Apologists are making great efforts to credit the Bush gang for the "harsh interrogation techniques" they claim led to information leading to knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts (eight years later!), and to insist that Obama's continuation of Bush's policies led to the successful outcome. Of course, it was 2002 when bin Laden and Al Qaeda were allowed to escape from Tora Bora; Bush said repeatedly that bin Laden, as an individual, was not that important and his death or capture was not a significant matter; and in 2005, Bush dissolved the CIA unit that was dedicated to the search for bin Laden.

Enough effort by political partisans can change how society views history: Witness the whitewashing of the legacy of Ronald Reagan.