And Cue Up Rush Limbaugh...

Almost as if on cue after Mark's post about the worst president ever, Rush Limbaugh said this:

The best president in my mind, the gentleman president of all time, is George W. Bush ... he conducted himself as professionally and proficiently as possible.

Let's just look at one aspect of the Bush presidency, the most expensive (coming in at over a trillion dollars) and the most destructive blunder (over five thousand American dead, and hundreds of thousands of American wounded vets): the war in Iraq.

Bush told us that Iraq was behind 9/11 and that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He got this information from a source named "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who wanted asylum in Germany. The German intelligence service told Bush that Curveball was lying.

Ahmed Chalabi provided the Bush administration with similar intelligence. He was a special guest of Laura Bush at the 2004 presidential inaugural. He was also an Iranian spy: he gave Iran information about codes that US intelligence had broken.

Yes, all the neocons in the Bush administration were fooled into invading Iraq based on lies from an agent of Iran, the country the same people are now telling us is a terrible threat to the entire world, and especially Israel.

Bush was either duped by Iranian spies or was lying about Iraqi WMDs.

Either the Bush administration knew these sources were lying, or they were duped by them. It's hard to believe the Bush administration was really that incredibly stupid, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they were lying.

Before the Iraq invasion vice president Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld paraded before cable news cameras telling us it would be a cakewalk. The war would last just six days, or six weeks, or six months at the most. During that time I wrote many times about previous American invasions of other countries that had been successful: they all required us to stay there for 50 to 100 years: Japan, Germany, South Korea, the Philippines. When you invade a country, you basically have to stay there forever to make it stick -- it's the "You break it, you bought it" theory of invasion. You can't just go in, beat up the bad guys, take their oil, then leave and expect it to be stable, functioning democracy. But that was the lie that Bush sold us.

Bush never understood the "You break, you bought it" theory of invasion.

Bush told us the war would pay for itself: we would take Iraqi oil to pay for it. After more than 10 years, we have spent more than a trillion dollars on Iraq. Most of it was in fighting the war, but hundreds of billions went into building and rebuilding and re-rebuilding infrastructure that was bombed over and over again. Tens of billions went into cash that was flown into the country by the planeload as bribes to warlords to fight on our side. A lot of that cash never made it to the warlords, it went into the pockets of mercenaries ("security contractors" in Bush speak) who stole it. And it will continue to cost us billions every year, for decades, as we continue to pay the medical costs of the tens of thousands veterans who were mangled for life.

Bush installed a sectarian Shiite government in Iraq, which is essentially a puppet of Iran. The Shiites immediately began to persecute the minority Sunnis in retribution for the decades of persecution that Saddam had visited upon them. This opened the door for ISIS to invade the majority Sunni areas in Iraq near the Syrian border, threatening the very existence of the Iraqi government and raising the possibility of a terrorist takeover of the entire country.

All because George W. Bush had to overturn the applecart in Iraq, either because he had daddy issues or because his oil exec cronies wanted the Iraqi oil (which the Chinese got, by the way).

Now, the reason for going over all this ancient history is not just to cast aspersions on Bush, but to illustrate why Rush Limbaugh is wrong. One presumes that Limbaugh admires Bush because he made tough decisions and imposed the American stamp of power on the world.

But that was a failure: today Iraq is a total mess. Americans have no influence over the Iraqi government -- that was lost while Bush was still president. In 2008 Bush signed the status of forces agreement that pulled Americans out of Iraq in 2011 -- not Obama.

Worse, the aftermath of the Iraq War spilled over into Syria and destabilized that country. Most of the ISIS terrorists were radicalized and recruited in the prisons of Iraq during Bush's reign of terror (remember Abu Ghraib?).

The lesson of the war in Iraq is that you can't believe anything that anyone over there tells you: Curveball and Chalabi were liars with their own agendas. You can't trust that any of your "allies" in the region will help you: they won't, they're only using you for their own purposes.

Yet, even with this experience behind us, people like John McCain were instantly ready to back ISIS terrorists when the Syrian civil war started -- he even posed in pictures with them. And this isn't just me saying this, it's Rand Paul too.

Did McCain know these guys were ISIS terrorists? Of course not. He wouldn't willingly deal with these people. But that's the point. McCain was duped just like Bush was. We're damned lucky that he never became president. John McCain also wanted to fight in Libya. And Georgia. And Crimea. For a man who lived through a terrible war, this man has learned absolutely nothing about war.

Getting back to Limbaugh's statement, his characterization of Bush as "professional and proficient" is as laughable as it is ironic. Nothing about the Iraq War, Bush's singular "achievement," was professional or proficient. Everything about it, from conception to execution to termination was terribly bungled.

Bush started a war that couldn't be won and made America weaker.

Bellicose bumpkins like Rush Limbaugh think George Bush was a good president because Bush ran roughshod over foreigners and blustered about American power. But in the end those displays of naked aggression backfired. Bush started a war that couldn't be won and made America weaker. And much poorer. And killed a lot of good men and women.

There is simply no question that the United States is far better off after six years of Obama than after eight years of Bush, by any conceivable objective measure. More to the point: our worst problems came from Bush's conscious decisions to invade Iraq and let banks go crazy with mortgage derivatives.

And Obama's biggest mistake? Trying to get all Americans access to medical care.

Which for conservatives like Rush Limbaugh is beyond the pale!