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Friday, October 20, 2017

Comparing Presidents is sophistry

George Bush was a very bad President.  This week, many liberal commentators are using him this week as some sort of comparative barometer of decency for a cynical political purpose. The cynical political purpose isn't even that valuable. They merely mean to say, in so many words, Trump is gross.  That seems obvious enough. We shouldn't have to make ridiculous compromises with the Bush legacy in order to say that.
In his speech on Thursday, Bush criticized the Trump administration's immigration policies, remarking, "We've seen nationalism distorted into nativism, forgotten the dynamism that immigration has always brought to America." But when Bush was in office, he deported thousands of Muslim immigrants after the 9/11 attacks. As Glenn Greenwald noted at the Intercept in 2015, the former president also "quickly and secretly implemented an illegal scheme of warrantless domestic eavesdropping aimed largely at Muslims."

Before Trump took office, there was concern that his administration would create a database of Muslims, which he repeatedly threatened to do (before denying he made those threats). But Bush did actually create such a database, called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), that, according to CNN, "disproportionately targeted Arabs and Muslims and was a point of contention between rights groups and the federal government for nearly a decade." (Barack Obama's administration ended the system, saying it had become outdated.)

Trump has created a commission to study "voter fraud" in an obvious effort to intimidate voters and drive turnout down—Bush did the same thing. Trump has appointed unqualified cronies to important posts—Bush nominated his White House counsel, who had never been a judge, to the Supreme Court. Trump's administration denies climate change is a problem—so did Bush's.

It's not just that Bush was bad too. (Bush was very very bad too!) The point is that the bad Presidencies of Bush and Trump (and yes I would throw Obama in with them) do not exist in isolation from one another. One shapes the world in which the other can exist. Bush is the context from which Trump derives. Trump is a monster. Bush was one of the monsters that begat this one.  One implicates the other. There's no honest way to do a favorable/unfavorable comparison.  But there are a lot of dishonest people out there.

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