George W. Bush Makes a Brutal Return to Our Psyche

I wish I could say that I took pure satisfaction at the slip of the tongue, but hearing Bush’s semi-confession was, in its own way, brutal. It was like my brain left my body, hurtling back through time to 17-year-old me. It wanted to tell my younger self that the thing I most wanted the people in power at the time to admit had finally tumbled out of the septuagenarian’s mouth.



It all seems hopelessly naïve now, me thinking that through sheer force of will I’d prevent Bush from winning a second term. But in 2004, on a steady diet of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and New York magazine (in print), I was so sure that even though I was young, the adults in this country were able to see things for what they were: That President Bush had brought our country into a war in Iraq under false pretenses. Kids just months older than me were being sent across the world to a country most couldn’t find on a map, ordered to risk their lives on a mission that was ostensibly about protecting American democracy at home.



But while we’re thinking about the past, let’s speak honestly about it. Coming of political age during George W. Bush’s presidency was like learning about healthy relationships from Gone Girl. The orderly and just government we learned about in elementary school and the Constitution we were trained to revere in our civics classes suffered a body blow in the 2000 presidential election. An apathetic populace grinned and shrugged as a man who got sworn in on the strength of an anonymous opinion from a conservative Supreme Court earned the power to make war. The person you were supposed to admire—the president!—was a nepotism hire who could barely string a sentence together.