As the Bush administration fades away in the rearview mirror, my sense is that many people — even liberals — are forgetting what it was really like. It becomes, in memory, just another administration whose policies you disapprove of, like the reign of Bush the elder.

But it wasn’t. It was an administration that deliberately misled us into war, exploiting an atrocity to pursue an agenda that had nothing to do with that atrocity — and causing vast amounts of death and destruction in the process, not to mention undermining American strength.

And it was an administration under which America became a torturer, with the enthusiastic approval of top officials.

This wasn’t normal. And if it’s going be normal from now on, all the more reason to remember the Bush years with horror.