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11.15.2010 0

The Bush Presidency Revisionism Is Out of Control

This week, Americans watched George W. Bush come back on the political scene through the release of his memoirs, Decision Points. He hit the media circuit with appearances on Oprah, Hannity, and a special prime-time interview with Matt Lauer, as well as Rush Limbaugh. And over the past week, it seemed as if some Republicans forgot that the Bush administration was a shift towards Big Government programs that have fundamentally changed the nation.

With the Obama administration at historic lows in popularity, it’s no surprise people look back on the Bush administration and wonder if it was all that bad. But we should not allow revisionism to color our memory.

It was the Bush administration that orchestrated the largest bailouts in our nation’s history through the now permanent revolving bailout fund called TARP. It was the same administration that launched a massive expansive of the federal Education Department through “No Child Left Behind.” And it was the same administration that launched a massive expansion of Medicare that continued the nation of down the slippery slope towards ObamaCare.

Voters across the nation casted ballots against Obama and his Big Government schemes as well as the Big Government schemes of the past on November 2nd, 2010. The electorate made it clear that it is sick and tired of the career politicians like the Bushes that have led the nation into financial disarray.

But even though the electorate has spoken multiple times on his administration, that has not stopped Bush from trying to explain his version of history. Bush is confident that he made the right decisions for the most part and left the country better off. As Bush said in an interview on CBS News, “Obviously it’s gonna take time for history to tell the full story… but yeah I think it’s better.” And he frequently reminded us that history would judge him as a great leader decades from now.

Howard Rich, Chairman of Americans for Limited Government, noted that Bush was reckless in office and left the country in shambles. Rich noted in a February that, “[a]s a result of Bush’s fiscal recklessness, budget surpluses turned into deficits and a $5.7 trillion national debt soared to $10 trillion. Also, Republicans are quick to forget that Bush is on the hook for a considerable portion of the unsustainable spending that is currently driving our debt even further into the stratosphere.”

Rich further stated that “[t]he simple, unavoidable truth is that Bush and his GOP allies were fiscal liberals, and no amount of ‘Republican revisionism’ can erase that fact.”

It is hard to imagine that historians will someday look back on the Bush administration as anything but an expansion of Big Government schemes that slowly destroyed the economy.

While Republicans ponder the current actions of the Obama administration, they should not be blinded by the revisionism being sold by Bush and his associates. The very government actions that inspired the tea party movement began under the Bush administration and came to a boiling point in the early days of the Obama administration.

As Americans we love to look back on our history through rose-colored glasses. But to argue that we had it better under the Bush administration is a failure to understand our history accurately. Time has already judged that the Big Government expansion started under the Bush administration has enabled the further expansion of government that led to the rise of Obama and his uber-liberal Congress. That’s not an accomplishment.

Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com.

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