Fuck no.

There is currently a meme on the front page of Reddit with over 11,000 upvotes whose sheer earth-shattering stupidity demands an entire article all to itself. The fact that it has cracked the top ten on r/all means that we’ll inevitably see this meme widely circulated by liberals throughout Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets in the coming days, and the idea contained therein — which I have already been encountering with increasing frequency online — will likely go viral and become an even more common sentiment within America’s political faux-left. The following is my own humble attempt at an antivirus.

The offending meme is titled “I never thought I would miss George W. Bush.” Here it is:

The meme is a reference to an online trend started by a billboard, pictured up top, which mysteriously appeared in Minnesota by the I-35 in February of 2010. The question of whether or not Hague fugitive George W. Bush was missed went viral and spawned countless meme variations, remaining a part of internet folklore to this day.

And now, for many woolly-headed amnesiac liberals, the answer to that question is apparently a resounding yes. Yes, they do miss the president whose decisions helped facilitate the slaughter of a million Iraqis over crude oil. Yes, they do miss the president who checked America into the war in Afghanistan from which it still to this day has not been able to check out. Yes, they do miss the president whose actions after 9/11 escalated the surveillance state to Orwellian dimensions and created a situation where incumbent administrations can spy on their political opponents. They wish they could have it all back, because Trump says stupid things.

Over the last five months I’ve watched the notoriously mainstream liberal masses of greater Reddit grow to embrace the Republican war criminal for everything from defending the corporate media to dressing as Santa to painting portraits to “nailing” a fucking handshake in a clip from fucking 2007. All of these subjects have tens of thousands of upvotes, which, if you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, means they made it to the front page and may have had their ideas consumed by hundreds of thousands or even millions of viewers once they were copied and spread throughout social media, because the front page of Reddit is a major trend-setter for internet culture. My point being that if it’s happening on Reddit, it’s happening on the rest of the internet, too.

This newfound Dubya love appears to be coming entirely from the fact that (A) Dubya isn’t Trump and (B) Russiagate has made liberal Democrats a lot more comfortable with neocons like Bush, John McCain, and Dick Cheney. Which I would find a lot less disconcerting if these drooling CNN zombies were at least also condemning Trump for his more Bush-like behavior in recent weeks, but they’re not. A read through the comments of the “I never thought I’d miss George W. Bush” thread shows Trump’s missile strike against the Syrian government being largely ignored and being rigorously defended when it did come up. They don’t dislike Trump because he’s beginning to act like Bush, they dislike him because he isn’t enough like Bush. Which I suppose makes some sense, considering their beloved Obama continued and expanded all of Bush’s most evil policies. They’re like an abused girl with daddy issues, never comfortable until she finds a guy who’ll hurt her in the same ways as dear ol’ dad.

This is just plain weird. He was even on Ellen. The man who put the planet on the fast track to world war three is now talked about with sincere affection. Everything from his nursing home antics at the Dallas Memorial to his self-portraits of his feet are being dredged up with this Stockholm Syndrome-esque nostalgia for the good old days when the world war was just in its adorable infancy.

Bush is a war criminal. He is single-handedly responsible for the deaths of countless innocent people for absolutely no reason at all other than appeasing the deep state and expanding the bank accounts of a few of his buddies. When his administration lied about those WMDs, he made himself responsible for that entire heinous planetary crime. He makes Putin look like the Dalai Lama. That’s not even touching on the unfathomable suffering and destruction he is indirectly responsible for when he destabilized an entire region, sending it into chaos, creating countless refugees and birthing the age of terrorism.

If Bush had led any other country, America would have invaded and regime-changed it before the end of his first term. You know it, I know it. There would be no need for false flags to manufacture consent for his removal. The sheer facts of his murderous invasions combined with his clearly deficient IQ would have been plenty, with maybe a few pics of the kids he continues to kill with his ongoing legacy of depleted uranium in the area. If America was looking from outside in on what George W. Bush did during his administration, people would be clamouring to have this heinous monstrous idiot removed from office by any means possible.

If Trump can only avoid becoming that, he will have been a better president than George W. Bush. If he winds up being a horrible president but at least falls short of Dubya’s immense body count, he will still have been better than Bush. For fuck’s sake, liberals, it’s entirely possible that Trump’s newfound inclination toward regime change in Syria was driven by bipartisan demands that he increase tensions with Russia! If you keep braying for him to become more Bush-like, you could very well get what you asked for in the form of a full-scale invasion of Syria, North Korea, Iran or God knows where else just because he’s an egotist who can’t handle being unpopular! Is that really what you want? Truly?

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. The stories we’re being fed about Assad and the Syrian gas attacks are already perfectly mirroring American public discourse regarding Saddam and WMDs circa 2002. If you keep demanding another Bush administration, you’re going to fucking get it.

“Miss me yet?”

Fuck no.

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