It’s Always the Right Time to Call George W. Bush a War Criminal
If George W. Bush is not going to stand trial for war crimes, he should at the very least stop appearing in public to weigh in on unjustified wars, as he did this week when he accidentally referred to the “wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
George W. Bush accidentally invoked his own war crimes this week. (TIM SLOAN/AFP via Getty Images)
On January 20, 2009, the United States completed a changing of the guard. As was customary, the outgoing president attended the new president’s swearing in before flying out of town. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews made an uncharacteristically lucid remark about George W. Bush’s flight from Washington: “It’s going to be like the Romanovs, too, and I mean that. There’s a sense here that they are fallen from grace, that they’re not popular, that the whole family will now go into retreat.”
Matthews’s remark raised objections from his fellow talking heads. Keith Olbermann (yes, that Keith Olbermann) reminded him that many predicted Richard Nixon and those around him would be similarly exiled, only for them to reemerge as public figures in the years after Watergate.
“Let’s not even put George W. Bush anywhere in the category of Richard Nixon,” Matthews retorted. “Richard Nixon was tragic, and he made terrible mistakes, he did wrong things, but he was a major president.”
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