No escaping history

Some folks are desperately trying to repair George W. Bush's broken legacy by rewriting history. Jon Chait is particularly impressed with Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin's valiant try at defending the indefensible. "It is so slavish and so crude it inadvertently exposes all the catastrophic weaknesses in the Bush record that more clever defenders have usually learned to tiptoe around," he wrote. Chait cited a particularly masterful sentence. "Unlike Obama’s tenure," Rubin wrote, "there was no successful attack on the homeland after 9/11." Chaits correctly noted that this is not true. But, he drolly opined, "exempting the most disastrous attack on the United States from Bush’s record of avoiding terrorism is a feat of propaganda that, while common, continues to boggle the mind. Emperor Honorius Kept Rome Safe, except that one time it was sacked by the Visigoths."