Ironic. Insulting. And unsettling to see former President George W. Bush rewrite history as the good guy today in Shanksville, Pennsylvania on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — calling out "violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home" for their "disregard for human life."
It’s unsettling of course because we know that after his administration failed to read the myriad, alarming warning signs leading up to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, Bush exploited the unity Americans felt in the wake of the attacks, to fearmonger a lie about weapons of mass destruction and ties to Osama Bin Laden — so the citizenry would swing along with the unprovoked invasion of a Iraq.
An invasion that killed hundreds of thousands of humans and spawned the scourge of ISIS - "violent extremists" that plague the world today - in unstable regions like Afghanistan, where Bush’s other disastrous and costly war just ended, after 20 long years, leaving tens of thousands of innocents dead, several trillion of dollars spent — and a vacuum for an emboldened enemy to fill.
Bush, who has been out of the limelight for 12 years, on Saturday briefly sounded like that same disingenuous alarmist who gave the fear-mongering State of The Union “axis of evil” speech in January 2002 — that was the impetus to ensuring America, indeed, would have a blood-thirsty foe to fight abroad for decades to come.
The disastrous eight years under Bush created a lasting sense of desperation -- namely after initiating endless wars and insitigating the 2008 "Great Recession," which bankrupted millions of lives.
Arguably, that lingering desperation was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the eventual precipitous rise to power of a phony, populous demagogue like Donald Trump.
And, of course, Trump was the culprit who emboldened those same “violent extremists at home” — namely the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists — of which Bush was clearly referencing on Saturday.
So, when the guy who was clearly instrumental in ensuring the manifestation of an “evil” enemy “abroad” — and at “home” attempts to strike a protective, foreboding tone about those same visceral threats, his words fall resoundingly flat.
It's crucial to connect these dots if we earnestly going to learn our lesson from the mistakes of our recent past. And not get fooled again.
