Apparently Ellen DeGeneres has received flak about being pictured with former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game.

In response, DeGeneres went on her show to defend her friendship with the ex-president:

“I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different, and I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s okay that we’re all different. Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them. When I say be kind to one another, I don’t only mean the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone.”

While people can and did appreciate Ellen’s call for kindness, this isn’t just a case of people with differing views. It is, however, a perfect illustration of why the Obama administration should have pursued legal action against members of the Bush administration for violating the Geneva Convention and international law by advocating and carrying out attacks on civilians and torture.

The current fecal tornado that is the Trump presidency has addled the minds of many Americans who now look with poor short term memories back at the Bush years with a misguided sense that things were simpler then, that Bush’s incompetence as a commander-in-chief was harmless, neglecting the fact that the Iraq War was founded on lies on that it cost thousands of civilian and American lives.

Most liberals are familiar with the story concocted by the Bush administration to start a war with Iraq in the wake of 9/11 despite no link between Saddam Hussein and the attack on the World Trade Center—the reliance on unreliable witnesses, the fabrication of evidence of a link, the use of a British report on Saddam’s weapons cache that plagiarized and misused information from an article from the 1990’s about the FIRST GULF WAR before Saddam was forced to destroy 95 to 98 percent of his arsenal.

Bush’s first strikes on Iraq were famously to inspire “shock and awe” on the Iraqis to lead to a quick victory and involved relentless bombing that ended up killing mostly civilians, as indicated by journalists viewing morgue records. Bombings targeted critical infrastructure like electric power and left little potable water in some areas, a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney decided that dealing with terrorists should lead to America moving to “the dark side” to enact a now notorious torture program. While Bush and Cheney spent years lying about the program, using the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation,” Bush would later in 2010 admit that he had overseen torture and tried to defend its use, despite its violating American and international law.

By the conservative estimate of the site Iraq Body Count, 85% of all US airstrikes killed civilians under Bush’s watch. Life in Iraq was hell.

Take the story of young Salee Allawee, a girl caught in one of these airstrikes, interviewed with her father Hussein Allawee Feras on Democracy Now in 2007—an airstrike that killed her brother and her best friend:

SALEE ALLAWEE: [translated] We were just sitting there, completely unaware. Hijran asked, “What’s that black thing coming towards us? So we all stood up. And I said to Tabarak, “Let’s go!” It made a sound like whoosh. Hijran had already run to a pile of bricks. It fell right in the middle of us. I flew through the air towards the same pile of bricks. I grabbed onto them right away.

HUSSEIN ALLAWEE FERAS: [translated] Just like we’re sitting here now, we were just sitting there, stirring our tea, as I remember. Just stirring tea. Suddenly, we were thrown up in the air, and there was dust and smoke and blood and pieces of flesh on the walls that are still there now. It was a strong blast. Some of us ran into the house, overcome by terror. In our fear, we had forgotten that the children were outside, and they had only been three or four meters away from us.

SALEE ALLAWEE: [translated] It fell right in the middle of us, and it made a circle in the street. Rusul was carrying her sister’s teddy bear, and it got all dirty.

HUSSEIN ALLAWEE FERAS: [translated] I asked if anyone was hurt, because all of our clothes were stained with the blood and flesh that had sprinkled over the fence. We heard screaming, and we ran back outside. Akram and Tabarak were scattered in pieces across the ground. I looked around for Salee, who was 30 or 40 feet away sitting on her knees, calling for me and her mother. It looked like there was nothing wrong with her body. Then our neighbor said, “Come quickly,” and I ran with my wife, and she cried out, “My daughter!” And we lifted Salee up, and my neighbor shouted, “Her legs are gone!” I can’t describe what it’s like, looking at your daughter, carrying her in your arms, covered in blood, and her legs are not there.

SALEE ALLAWEE: [translated] Uncle Hamid, all of us, were wearing jackets. He was wearing his jacket, too. And the poor guy had to use it to pick up body parts.

Such human tragedies and horrors were repeated by the tens of thousands in Bush’s bogus war.

Disgust over George W. Bush’s walking around a free man, rubbing elbows with talk show hosts and blathering about his shitty paintings is not simply an issue of left vs. right, of squabbles over policy. George W. Bush started a monstrous war and disgraced this country with the stain of horrific human rights abuses.

The Obama administration eventually refused to hold Bush and his cronies accountable for their crimes against humanity, settling instead on “looking forward.” The problem with “looking forward” is that you look past behavior that needs to be punished.

So, while I applaud Ellen’s message of kindness to others, I do not support her friendship with a mass murderer. She wouldn’t be seen with O.J. Simpson at a football game. Her friend George W. Bush murdered many more people than that. As Hollywood, like other industries, attempts to grapple with sexual predators in its midst, shunning them when revealed, why are mass killing and torture less offensive?