PERRspectives: Bush Finally Greeted as Liberator

May 22, 2009

Bush Finally Greeted as Liberator

In the run-up to the war in Iraq, Dick Cheney infamously predicted, "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted in liberators." Just days later John McCain too declared, "There's no doubt in my mind" that "we will be welcomed as liberators." Now six years later, George W. Bush is finally doing some liberating, not in Baghdad but in New Mexico.

Speaking to graduating high school students in Artesia, the ex-President revealed it was he himself who had been liberated. As the AP recounted, Bush seemed grateful to have escaped the last throes of his presidency:

"Life is returning back to normal."
Bush, in one of his few public appearances since leaving office in January, told the students that leaving office lifted a heavy burden.

"I no longer feel that great sense of responsibility that I had when I was in the Oval Office. And frankly, it's a liberating feeling," he told seniors from Artesia High School.

Of course, it's clear that Bush's former vice president is also feeling liberated. Freed of the constraints of office, electoral politics and the truth, Dick Cheney on Thursday delivered a blistering attack on President Obama's national security policies which McClatchy concluded "ignored some inconvenient truths." Among the omissions and revisionism in a speech which featured 25 mentions of 9/11 was Iraq, cited only twice. That would be the same Iraq Cheney in September 2003 deemed "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Mercifully, the "greeted as liberators" sound bite was long ago retired from the official Republican talking points on Iraq. As for the bogus link between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks, as Bush, Cheney ("We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists") and their acolytes continue to demonstrate, that fraud is alive and well.

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