PEPFAR is a great program but people who argue Bush wasn’t as bad as you’d think because the millions the program is credited w/ saving over 2 administrations should be weighted against the hundreds of thousands killed in wars are making a morally crooked & incomplete argument
We could go thru the long list of Bush’s legacy all day, but so I don’t thread forever, I’ll add that beyond bodies piled up, there are other ways to ruin lives & families at home & abroad than war dead. The wars displaced millions. Surely their lives matter too.
Also, this isn’t some bias against just Bush, there is a reason LBJ’s legacy of civil rights and saving numerous lives via healthcare programs is overshadowed by Vietnam
Body counts on a president’s watch is additive, it doesn’t morally subtract from lives you’re credited with improving
Also, his new video is stupid and effectively meaningless. “Partisanship” isn’t the problem with what has gone deeply wrong in the past few months, he might as well have cut an ad called Both Sides, Man
Best part of the video message is that he mentions that “we’ve faced times of testing” before, explicitly referencing the Bush era of post-9/11 testing...which he & the country epically failed in ways we & other countries still haven’t recovered from.
Bush is also so unlike Trump and is so unnerved by him that he spent the last election cycle trying to help retain Trump’s grip on power on Capitol Hill politico.com/story/2018/09/…
If you want to rehab his image because u still remember the Bush era and like him, fine have at it, but at least have the intellectual curiosity not to do it under the cheap banner of “orange Cheeto bad.” If u think there isn’t a direct line from the Bush to Trump eras...
...I don’t know what to tell you, man
