I can kind of forgive America for making 2000 close enough for Bush to slip into the White House. Al Gore ran an uninspired campaign, Bill Clinton was still viewed as Slick Willie, and the media seemed far more concerned that Al Gore occasionally sighed during a debate than the fact that George W. Bush didn’t seem so much to know what the hell he was talking about.
But 2004 — that’s totally different. We had invaded a country that didn’t have the weapons of mass destruction that were the reason we’d invaded that country. We had found out that we were torturing prisoners in custody. The president was already showing himself to be more petulant lightweight than brilliant leader. And America still picked him, because John Kerry misremembered some stuff he did in Vietnam and wind-surfed.
It was reckless and unforgivable, and you can draw a direct line from that decision by our country to the disaster we inhabit today.
