Many of us had been wait­ing for tougher talk from Barack Oba­ma about John McCain and the Bush pres­i­den­cy. At the Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion, Oba­ma began to deliv­er – but it wasn’t stark enough.

When have we ever had a president publicly reject the Geneva Conventions and endorse torture as a matter of national policy?

I recent­ly vis­it­ed Aus­tralia and New Zealand, and it made me real­ize that we need myth­ic lan­guage – the kind that comes from oral cul­tures reliant on hand­ed-down leg­ends – to cap­ture what has hap­pened these past eight years. Like the Abo­rig­ines’ dream­time sto­ries, we need some­thing more pow­er­ful than ​“the failed poli­cies of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.” I pro­pose ​“The Stolen Years.”

It began, of course, with the stolen elec­tion in 2000. But just think how much has been stolen from us: our moral­i­ty and, indeed, our sense of humanity.

These are not just pol­i­cy fail­ures. This has been a spir­i­tu­al pil­lag­ing of any sense that the Unit­ed States can ever aspire to, or rep­re­sent, high­er prin­ci­ples; that our nation is, or can be, a democ­ra­cy, how­ev­er flawed; that the gov­ern­ment cares about cit­i­zens oth­er than the real­ly rich.

The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has seized all we hold dear and ground it into the dirt with its boot heels.

Most impor­tant has been the nation’s sense of its own moral­i­ty. Few of us are delud­ed that the U.S. gov­ern­ment was, before the Bush régime, a bea­con of moral rec­ti­tude and social jus­tice. The Unit­ed States has over­thrown many gov­ern­ments, most­ly in secret, and sup­port­ed repres­sive rulers. But when have our lead­ers pub­licly and adamant­ly reject­ed the Gene­va Con­ven­tions and endorsed tor­ture as a mat­ter of nation­al pol­i­cy? It’s one thing for there to be a gap between nation­al prin­ci­ples and gov­ern­ment prac­tices, and quite anoth­er for a pres­i­dent to deride those prin­ci­ples as no longer essen­tial to the nation’s moral compass.

Also stolen from us has been a faith in the rule of law, the notion that the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion is a foun­da­tion­al doc­u­ment whose prin­ci­ples must be adhered to. The law­less­ness and bar­barism of Guan­tá­namo – where peo­ple have been impris­oned for years with­out tri­als, or denied the right to know the spe­cif­ic accu­sa­tions against them, where peo­ple have been tor­tured – has leeched from us any sense that our judi­cial sys­tem is any bet­ter than, say, the secret Star Cham­bers of the Tudor and Stu­art monarchs.

After rev­e­la­tions in the ​’70s about the FBI’s sur­veil­lance of artists, civ­il rights, fem­i­nist and anti­war activists, there was a nation­al out­cry. As a result, Con­gress restrict­ed domes­tic spy­ing on Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. Bush’s war­rant­less wire­tap sur­veil­lance pro­gram, how­ev­er, stole that basic right to not be spied on by our government.

With Bush’s sug­ges­tion that cli­mate change was some imag­i­nary hoax, with his thwart­ing of stem cell research, and with his FDA’s neg­li­gence in apply­ing strict test­ing to a host of prod­ucts, he robbed the coun­try of eight years of cut­ting-edge research on the envi­ron­men­tal and med­ical chal­lenges – if not emer­gen­cies – that face us.

Of course, what Bush most want­ed to sack was any notion that the gov­ern­ment could help or sup­port its cit­i­zens. His goal was famous­ly artic­u­lat­ed by right-winger Grover Norquist: to ​“cut gov­ern­ment … down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

The after­math of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na gave us heart-wrench­ing images of what this meant: peo­ple strand­ed on their roofs, wav­ing des­per­ate­ly for help; peo­ple forced to live in swel­ter­ing filth in con­ven­tion cen­ters; peo­ple left to rot. The ide­ol­o­gy stole any ves­ti­gial notions of a com­mon good in which we might all have an inter­est – and to which we should all con­tribute, espe­cial­ly those of us more priv­i­leged than others.

While pres­i­dents have often lied to us – the secret bomb­ing of Cam­bo­dia, Iran-Con­tra, ​“I nev­er had sex­u­al rela­tions with that woman” – none has mount­ed such a full bore, cyn­i­cal, Sovi­et-style pro­pa­gan­da cam­paign against its own peo­ple as George ​“WMDs” and ​“Mis­sion Accom­plished” Bush.

Such pro­pa­gan­da efforts were espe­cial­ly aimed at women. While Lau­ra Bush went to Afghanistan to show her con­cern for gen­der oppres­sion, her hus­band was busi­ly clos­ing the White House Office for Women’s Ini­tia­tives and Out­reach, remov­ing infor­ma­tion about issues like pay equi­ty and child­care from the Labor Department’s web­site, and post­ing bogus infor­ma­tion – such as the dis­cred­it­ed claim about a link between hav­ing an abor­tion and get­ting breast can­cer – on the Nation­al Can­cer Institute’s website.

These are not failed poli­cies. This is Grand Theft Auto – of who we are, and what we could become. Pro­gres­sives and lib­er­als should have ​“The Stolen Years” as our mantra, and say ​“nev­er again.”