Take George W. Bush. Just four years ago he left office with the lowest approval ratings in American history. He left a country in financial free fall, with a level of wealth inequality without parallel in US history, whose crumbling infrastructure and institutional incompetence was epitomized by Hurricane Katrina.
Abroad the reputation of the United States had been dragged through the dirt by the disastrous response of his administration to the 9/11 attacks, that included Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the rendition of suspected ‘enemy combatants’ to countries like Syria and Egypt to be tortured, two major wars that had achieved nothing substantial except to leave hundreds of thousands of people dead – one of which was launched on blatantly false premises.
These are not things that you would expect a responsible democratic society to want to forget in a hurry – from the point of self-interest if nothing else. But the good news for Bush is that the forgetting has already begun, and everyone is doing their best to see that it continues.
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