He's Gone! (But Not Forgotten)

Three-hundred and eighty seven days ago, I tore the first page of my George W. Bush countdown calendar off of the stack. I got the calendar as a gag gift from my brother-in-law for Christmas 2007. Every morning since then, I’ve gone through the ritual of reminding myself of just one more reason that I couldn’t wait for this guy to get the hell out of the White House. Quotes, statistics, and little-known fun facts filled each day of the calendar; each and every one a stark reminder of what happens when power goes unchecked for too long, when lies and propaganda are allowed to pass as the truth. I saved some of the more notorious of them throughout the last year. Here’s some examples…

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees,” said President Bush on September 1, 2005, during a live interview with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. His assertion was widely ridiculed even at the time, but on March 2, 2006, the Washington Post reported on a “smoking gun”: newly released video of a briefing attended by Bush the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, during which there were grave warnings about the levees.

Quote from Vice-President Dick Cheney, given during an August 2002 speech: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, against us.”

Executive Orders, known as EOs, are legally binding directives issued by a president to federal agencies guiding implementation and execution of laws and policies. Much like his use of signing statements, Bush has used more EOs far more, and far more ideologically, than his predecessors. Previous presidents averaged about five EOs annually, but by 2005 Bush had issued four hundred. In Bush’s EOs, the term “unitary executive”; the radical doctrine that the president is legally superior to the legislative and judicial branches of government; was cited ninety-five times.

Quote from Porter Goss, Bush’s CIA director from 2004 – 2006, given to Congress in 2005: “At this time, there are no ‘techniques’, if I could say, that are being employed that are in any way against the law or would meet, would be considered torture or anything like that.”

There were two that stuck out from the rest, though. One of them showed a side of Bush that I never expected to see: I actually admired him for a half-second after reading it.

During his senior year at Andover, an elite New England prep school, George W. Bush formed a stickball league as a way of thumbing his nose at the athletic tradition of the school. He named his team the Nads.

The other one that stuck out, though, highlights the darkest side of the Bush Administration. It captures almost everything that was evil and wrong with the last eight years of our collective lives. It’s a quote from Kevin Tillman, whose brother Pat gave up a professional football career when the brothers joined the Army after 9/11. Pat was killed in 2004 in Afghanistan by “friendly fire”, in an incident that has been covered up by the Army and whose details seem to point to a possibility that his new-found dissent towards the War on Terror led someone from the inside to “silence” him.

“Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virture, and honor of its soldiers on the ground. Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started. Somehow torture is tolerated. Somehow lying is tolerated. Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense. Somehow nobody is accountable for this.”

This past Tuesday, I tore off the last of day of my countdown calendar. I looked up at the bulletin board behind my desk and stared at the eloquent words of Kevin Tillman. I watched the swearing in of President Obama, and I saw Bush board a plane and take off back to Texas.

I sincerely hope that we will have the “nads” to hold our former president and his ilk accountable for the hell that they have put the Tillmans and thousands of other American families through. Not only the Americans that sacrificed their lives, but also the Iraqis and Afghanis that died as a result of Bush’s misguided foreign policies. Obama has given all of us a hope for the future, but it’s a future that must begin with an acknowledgement and a satisfactory response to the problems of the past.


All quotes taken from “His Days Are Numbered: George W. Bush Countdown 2008 Calendar” by Alex Goulder. Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, Kansas City, MO, 2007. Used without permission.