Take Bush out of post-abuse Memory Hole

George W. Bush has disappeared from the national stage and national mind because neither the Left or the Right wants to think about him. Republicans want to disappear Bush to remove scarlet letter W from around their mid-term election necks. Democrats are so sick of this guy that mentioning his name makes the room unhappy and reaching for the Paxil. But we must remember George W. Bush because voters are blaming Obama for Bush-caused problems.

Americans are like people healing from abuse by blocking bad memories. The mention of the Bush name calls forth dozens of unpleasant memories and association, from war, lies, deceit, and to simply incompetant coasting aristocratic governence. So nobody speaks of him. He is down the memory hole.

In George Orwell's book 1984, in a big bureocratic government building, workers had nicknamed the garbage shoots placed throughout the building "memory holes'. Scraps of paper were shoved there to disappear. The state felt free to re-write history, and old propaganda that countered the new propaganda was put down the memory hole.

So it is with Bush. He goes down the memory hole and the Republicans re-brand as libertarian populists.

We live in the United States of Amnesia, as writer Gore Vidal put it. Like a spiritual teacher with an obssessive focus on "The Now", our nation is disconnected to the flow of events that brought us here. Other countries aren't always this way. Some of the South American countries maintain a fierce historical narrative that puts American in the colonialist villian role. Democrats could use a little bit of that radical historical memory to remember who the villians in this story are.

President Obama has been doing a good job with a bad situation. The Bush Team handed him an exploding situation and he defused it. But elections aren't about the truth, they are about national mood, about the strange tidal flows of shaped opinion. With a mid-term coming up that could hand Congress to the Republicans, it's a tight time for Obama.

Somehow, the Right has gelled around being anti-Obama, and the Left has lost the sense that Obama is 'our guy'.
Obama has been governing with a sort of post-partisan elite bureocratic pragmatism, not as a Democrat particularly. And so the Democratic Base is confused, like "'do we have a dog in this fight?"

Luckily, we still remember that we dislike Bush. When we remember...