Commentary: At long last, sir, have you left no sense of decency?

Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: January 09, 2009

Even as President George W. Bush was packing up his knick-knacks and calling for the moving van, the White House spin machine was whirring along at Warp 6, doing its best to put a happy face on the sorry history of his eight years in the Oval Office.

The campaign is intended to write a first draft of history and thus forestall an inevitable judgment that the Bush presidency has made the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover look good by comparison.

His acolytes cling to a fading hope that historians somehow will treat him much more kindly 20 or 30 years down the road, as they have Harry S. Truman. If historians only worked from White House press releases, that dream might have a chance.

The baggage Mr. Bush will carry home to Dallas and Crawford weighs a lot more than his boxes of presidential tchotchkes. The baggage he leaves behind for an incoming President Barack Obama and the nation is backbreaking.

The White House spinners have moved past mere distortion of the facts into plain old lying.

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