John McCain Discovers America

We could go on and on here. The wreckage of the Bush years is as wide as it is deep. I found Newsweek’s cover story last week on "What Bush Got Right" unintentionally telling in this sense. I was surprised to find inside the covers of the magazine that Fareed Zakaria excoriated Bush’s devastation almost as aggressively as I might have. Turns out that Zakaria’s answer to his own title question is ’just about nothing’. He more or less gives Bush credit only for abandoning some of his own insanely destructive policies from the first term, and lamely shuffling back to the center-right policies of his own party (and father) and the so-hated Clintons. Me, I don’t call it "getting it right" when you set the neighborhood on fire and then decide that playing with matches ain’t such a great idea just before the last house goes down.

So what’s up with the title of the article? No doubt that – even now – wimpy centrist American media outlets can no longer just come right out and say what everyone knows, themselves included – that this administration, and more broadly, the regressive ascension of the last decade (and two more behind that) has been catastrophic.

McCain should be made to own this disaster fully.

Because he does.

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