Perhaps The Most Hideous Anniversary Of All

On this day five years ago, notwithstanding electoral fraud in Ohio, George W. Bush was re-elected president of the United States (here).

Over 62 million people voted to return this presidential pretender to power, the individual who read a child’s book in a Florida classroom while the Twin Towers fell in New York City, a portion of the Pentagon collapsed, and a plane crashed in central Pennsylvania, all due to intelligence failures on his watch in response to the ever-growing threat of Islamist terrorism.

Over 62 million people voted to return to power the individual who never resolved the mystery of the tainted Anthrax letters which appeared soon after the 9/11 attacks (more here). Over 62 million people voted to return to power the individual who, while forsaking the war of necessity against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, fabricated a mythology about Iraq and diverted precious resources to squander there instead (and by the way, you can consider this an appropriate postscript).

Over 62 million people voted to return to power the figurative head of our one-time ruling cabal of crooks who politicized virtually every function of government, ruthlessly punished its enemies by both barely legal and illegal means, waged war on the environment, spent us hopelessly into debt, invested absolutely nothing in this country on behalf of the middle class, encouraged our enemies, alienated our friends, and broke our military.

And yes, I know that doesn’t cover everything. And I also know that we know all of this.

(And this, by the way, is typical of the red-state triumphalism over Dubya’s supposed “mandate,” with more on that here; by the way, even though Obama won by a substantially larger margin than his predecessor, a Google search on “Barack Obama, 2008, president, mandate” yields 1,380,000 hits, whereas a search on “George W. Bush, 2004, president, mandate” yields 453,000,000 hits).

However, I believe it is necessary to remind us of all of this since the chattering classes of the punditocracy refuse to do that themselves. And a prime example of that is a recent column here by Jon Meacham of Newsweek, in which he tells us the following…

If the first President Bush was more willing to use force than is sometimes remembered, his son was more open to diplomacy, especially in his last years in office, than is virtually ever remembered.

I think the headline of this story pretty much refutes such sentiments from a partisan like Meacham, who once called Sen. Russ Feingold “a sane Howard Dean” here (gee, Dr. Dean was the first person to tell the clueless, accommodationist, triangulationist, Third-Way-and-perpetually-election-losing DNC establishment, so long enamored with their hero Joe Lieberman, that Democrats needed to compete in all 50 states to be successful; that sounds pretty “sane” to me).

Also, in his story, Meacham continues to perpetuate the utter fiction that this is a "center-right" country, as he also did here.

I gave this post its title because I think that the re-election of George W. Bush will emerge as a singularly dubious moment in our history. September 11th, by contrast, is a day of commemoration and an expression of unity, along with other solemn occasions. And there’s a bit of me that can actually forgive people who voted for Number 43 in 2000 – just a bit, though; I can see that it would have been hard for someone not well informed to understand what Dubya and his pals truly represented.

However, to me, November 2, 2004 will be the day in which the invincibly ignorant chose to reinstall the author of the vast majority of our current miseries. It is a date of almost unspeakable ignominy to commemorate an act for which there is no excuse, then, now, or for all time.

And, as Meacham did above, our corporate media continues to make excuses for George W. Bush.

And they always will.

Update: "And I'll bet you're going to blame Bush for this too," I hear some say (h/t Atrios).

Well, considering that his administration saw the lowest percentage of job creation since Herbert Hoover (and the jobs that were created disappeared from the recession), as well as the fact that he neglected this country's infrastructure (though Obama hasn't, as noted here), as well as the level of poverty that was already on the rise during his ruinous reign (here)...you figure it out.

Update 11/3/09: Heh, heh, heh (here - h/t Atrios).