Blaming Bush

I think the first time I was exposed to the word "scapegoat" was during the Watergate scandal. Former White House lawyer John Dean claimed he was being made the scapegoat for Richard Nixon's woes.

I didn't know what the word meant. The Random House Dictionary sheds some light on that, telling us that the word "scapegoat" means "a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place."

Apparently, the word has biblical origins. Leviticus, in the Old Testament, describes the ritual. As a part of Yom Kippur ceremonies, a goat was driven into the wilderness to die, symbolically carrying the sins of the people on its back.

Christian theology sees the story of the scapegoat as the foreshadowing of the story of Jesus and his sacrifice for humanity.

I don't know about that. In my life, most of the scapegoats I've known of were athletes who, fairly or unfairly, were blamed for their teams' failures — Bill Buckner, whose error was said to cost the Boston Red Sox the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets, or Scott Norwood, whose missed field goal led to the first of four consecutive Super Bowl defeats for the Buffalo Bills.

A far more serious example of scapegoating occurred before I was born — when Nazi propaganda blamed the Jews for Germany's problems after World War I.

I guess it is a tendency of human nature to look for someone to blame when things go wrong. Perhaps that is why Barack Obama has insisted that Americans should look to the future and not look back as they seek to deal with the many problems facing the nation and the world. It is a sentiment I agree with, to a certain extent, although I still believe, as I have written on this blog before, that Congress should investigate the decisions that were made that led to the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture techniques in affiliated interrogations.

I have advocated such an investigation not because I want to punish anyone (notably the former president and vice president) but because there are lessons to be learned from how those decisions were made, and I believe we can benefit from that knowledge.

But, lately, I've been sensing a real bloodlust on the part of the public, and the previous administration is at the heart of it. As I have pointed out on many occasions, I am a Democrat, and I was never a Bush–Cheney supporter. But, as I have also stated in this blog, economies are massive, complex things. Presidents can give direction from the bully pulpit, but it is unfair and inappropriate to give them excessive credit or blame for the millions of decisions that business owners must make.

And the same thing applies to the people in their administrations.

But some people are adamant about finding someone to blame.

For example, I was looking at the New York Times' website today. For the third straight time, Maureen Dowd wrote a column about former Vice President Dick Cheney. Granted, Cheney's activities recently have been unseemly, to say the least, for a former vice president, but Dowd's columns seem to be particularly vitriolic.

Dowd made no secret of her support for Obama during the campaign, even before Obama's bid for the nomination took hold with the rank and file. Well, Dowd's candidate won, and Cheney's out of office now. Cheney may be in the spotlight by his own choice, but he has no authority to speak of. It seems, to me, that it would be a good idea for Dowd to ease up now.

Dowd isn't the only one, though. On Facebook lately, members have had the option of joining a group that constantly urges people to revel in "not having George Bush as president." Recently, this group has been encouraging people to celebrate the six–month anniversary of the end of the Bush presidency on July 20. From this group's perspective, I suppose it would be expected that parties on that date — which also happens to be the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon — would include piñatas in the shape of Bush and Cheney's heads.

More recently, this group has been polling people, asking them whether they would prefer to have Bush back as president ... or be impaled. The latest "results" I saw indicated that 225,000 people would rather be impaled while about 1,000 would opt to have Bush back in the White House.

Talk about a push poll.

Actually, I suspect the results would be different if the choices were real rather than hypothetical.

I understand the temptation to hold Bush and Cheney responsible for all the problems America must deal with now. And, even with all the things that are on the current administration's plate, I still believe there are valuable lessons to be learned from how the previous administration made decisions that determined how foreign policy was conducted, especially regarding how a war was launched.

But some of these other things seem counterproductive to me. They may be psychologically satisfying, but they do little, if anything, to help us find our way out of this wilderness.