On Thursday night’s edition of “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow took the occasion of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library to share her thoughts on the whitewashing of our 43rd president’s legacy. She compared his eight years in office to the Carnival “Poop Cruise,” the cruise ship that went dead in the water in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, stranding passengers for days with no toilets, no fresh water and a rapidly rotting food supply.

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“If you work in the cruise industry, you might be worried about the impact of the whole poop cruise on your business,” Maddow said. “No. An executive of MSC was quoted right after the Poop Cruise thing saying the industry was pretty confident nobody was ever going to remember this.” (MSC stands for the Mediterranean Shipping Company, a division of which handles European cruises.)

This “nobody will remember” approach seems to be the modus operandi of the squadron of former Bush officials (and Lanny Davis) who have been pressed into service in the recent attempt to rehabilitate the George W. Bush legacy and pretend that the whole “invade a country on false pretenses” thing never happened.

“Idea number one,” said Maddow, is “the poop cruise idea is Americans have short memories. Idea number two is we are fast approaching the 10 year anniversary of the ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on May 1st.”

Will Americans remember the disaster that was the George W. Bush presidency or will they allow themselves to be lulled into believing that maybe it all wasn’t so bad?

And perhaps most bafflingly of all, Maddow said, the public opening of the Bush Library is set for May 1, next week, the tenth anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” speech.

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“They are opening the George W. Bush Presidential Library 10 years after the ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech,” which she concluded is “either an inside joke or this is some kind of crisis management test of the ‘Poop Cruise’ thesis, that Americans really do have very, shockingly short memories.”

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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