Political blind spots

I'm not much for writing long, flowing tributes to days when bad things happened because, quite frequently, they end up looking like this:

The years of shame, Paul Krugman, New York Times

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Bush's Fatal 9/11 flaw, Peter Beinart, The Daily Beast

George W. Bush thought al Qaeda’s attack was the major geopolitical event of our time. He was wrong.

It's funny to me that a large portion of Democratic activists are still fighting a losing battle against the Bush presidency, much in the same way I thought Republicans were foolish for continuing to fight against the Clinton presidency long after he was out of office. If anything, the disaster that has become the Obama presidency has made us realize that neither of the previous two presidents were as bad as the opposite side made them out to be. This political blind spot by Democrats is distracting them from the real story.... Rick Perry is on the rise, and he can (and probably will) BEAT Obama in 2012 if something doesn't change.