Postmortem

Salon has a sobering itemized list of the wreckage left in the wake of the Bush administration. A few of the most egregious examples:

• Number of manufacturing jobs lost since 2000: 3.78 million

• Increase in number of unemployed workers from 2001 to 2008: 4 million, a jump of 2.7 percent in the unemployment rate
• Cost to conduct the Iraq war per month: $12 billion
• Amount the Bush administration estimated the war would cost from start to finish: $60 billion
• Increase in the amount that the average employee pays toward employer-provided healthcare since 2000: 120 percent

And over at the New York Times, both Frank Rich and Dahlia Lithwick deliver a couple great op-ed pieces urging the country not to simply turn the page on the Bush years and move on. I have to admit that I haven’t had much patience for those who advocated trying administration officials on war crimes. After reading these articles, I’m a little less certain of my position. We Americans like to think of ourselves as eternal optimists who can shrug off our past failures; we aren’t inclined to sit around and deconstruct our fuck-ups. And in some ways, that’s probably a pretty healthy component for a national psyche to possess. But the last eight years have been bad; probably worse than we realize in our current shellshocked state. This administration has buried a lot of secrets that need to have a light shined on them, even as we look forward to a new political era.