Dear President George W. Bush,

I owe you an apology.  I said some pretty mean things in the heat of your Presidency, and now that I’ve had some time to cool off, I want to tell you that I’m sorry and how much I’ve changed.  I called you “the worst President ever,” a “war criminal,” and linked your Presidency to the end of democracy.  But I now know, it wasn’t you, it was me.

I didn’t realize that starting wars in the Arab world didn’t even need Congressional authorization!  You went above and beyond the call of law by getting authorization to use military force to spread democracy and liberate people from their evil dictators who we used to prop up.

You used signing statements to let Congress know which of its laws you planned to ignore.  Sure President Clinton used them first, but only a few times.  But now that President Obama has used them dozens of times, to specifically set aside any Congressional oversight, I realize that it is the prerogative of the Commander in Chief to decide what laws should be enforced and which laws should be ignored.  At the time I laughed at you for proclaiming yourself “the decider,” but now I realize you were just being honest.

Your illegal wiretapping scheme really made me mad.  Imagine the thought of the government being able to listen in on my phone calls, emails, text messages, any communication you want, just say it’s in connection with a “terrorism” investigation and it’s yours.  Of course I thought that seemed wrong at the time, and so did Senator Obama during the brief period of time he was campaigning to people like me, riled up and angry partisans.  But now that he is President he is keeping and extending all of your eavesdropping programs, and blocking any meaningful attempts at oversight.

You used Guantanamo Bay to imprison people you kidnapped from foreign countries and hold them outside of any established legal framework.  You invented an extra-judicial legal system to hold show trials so that the American values that we are supposedly at war to protect could never be applied to a new class of persons you called “enemy combatants.”  But after vowing to change all of that in a heated campaign, President Obama has reversed himself and is continuing to keep the prison open. He’s even going farther than you are and re-writing our laws to enable “indefinite detention” and do things that our founding fathers specifically designed our constitution to prevent.

Then there was the torture. You spent a great deal of energy at a high level of government deciding how much simulated drowning was too much, which positions hurt the most, and how much sleep deprivation would break someone but all the while being (mostly) careful not to kill anyone.  But President Obama has continued your policies, even applying them to PFC Bradley Manning, a US Citizen just like me, whose conditions of imprisonment are so objectionable that Amnesty International, The UN, and hundreds of leading American law professors have tried to get his torture to stop.  When Hillary Clinton’s spokesman was caught on the record objecting to Manning’s treatment, he was summarily fired, which means that Obama and Clinton seem to think the torture regime you came up with was a pretty good idea, President Bush.  I don’t know why I got so upset before.

One of the reasons your Presidency seemed so upsetting was because all of the thing you were doing were shrouded in Secrecy.  Even when you were sued by the ACLU you claimed broad privileges not to provide certain evidence, citing “state secrets.”  But President Obama obviously thinks you had good reason to do so, because he has expanded his use of state secrets privilege, not only using it to hide evidence but as grounds to dismiss entire cases because the people cannot know about what is being done in our name.

What little the public knew about the things you were doing came from leaks in your administration.  Although you made a lot of noise about prosecuting leakers, you never went as far as President Obama in actively prosecuting leak cases and making clear that the wrongdoing that is exposed by whistleblowers pales in comparison to the crime of speaking to the press.  Sorry again.

Of course there were also the tax cuts.  I thought you were so awful when you took the $237 billion dollar surplus we had in 2000 and got rid of it in one fell swoop by giving it away to the already-rich.  What a conniving, awful, and very Republican thing to do!  Until of course, President Obama made it a priority to use the final hours of a Democratic Congress to extend your tax cuts to the very wealthiest.  I know the country is broke fighting all of those wars, but obviously you were on the right track by making sure the wealthy keep their money so that it could trickle down to the rest of the population.  Very smart policy!  I now realize I was so wrong to object to your bi-partisan wisdom.

You made a lot of noise about the Social Security crisis — apparently it’s going to run out of money somewhere around 2040.  But even though you claimed a mandate to hand over my retirement to the salivating Wall Street bankers, you were never able to touch it.  I hated you for wanting to dismantle one of the crowning achievements of our liberal democracy.  But now that President Obama is soberly devoted to doing the same thing, I realize you were just a visionary, trying to do the right thing years ahead of your time.

In fact, I don’t really remember why I thought you were so awful at all, Mr. President.  It seems that with very few exceptions, President Obama has continued with all of your policies and priorities.  He does have a way of making me feel like he’s really smart and knows more than I do about stuff in a way that you, Mr. Bush, always made me wonder if you really knew what you were doing.  But it turns out you did!  You knew exactly what you were doing, because it was the same as this smart man who we all love, who really has his hands tied.  You must have had a hard time, President Bush — no wonder you were always so annoyed by reporters who asked you questions.

I don’t mean to insult you by saying that there’s no difference between you and President Obama.  I’m sure you know there are some very important differences.  And the blind partisan supporters of both of you will magnify the differences and will be very angry at the comparison, because to acknowledge the truth would make everything they worked for and believed in seem meaningless.  But the reasons that I hated you above all others from your party, the reasons that I thought you were singularly awful, those have been rendered meaningless and silly in the two short years since you’ve been gone.  In those most important ways, you’re no different than your successor, and we just don’t seem able to get all that worked up about it when he does it.

So please accept my sincerest apologies. I hope you’re having a great time in Dallas, or wherever you moved to after the photo ops at your “ranch” in Crawford were no longer needed.  Say hi to Laura, she always seemed to get the short end of the stick. (Is she considering a run for Senate now?)  And if you’re up for having a beer sometime, let me know.

Yours in citizenship,

Jon Marcus