The weeklong orgy of official lamentation over the death of former president George H. W. Bush, including the mystifying tradition of declaring a federal holiday, is finally over. It has served its purpose of such events, to scrub away all the misdeeds that the president committed and leave everyone with the impression that things were so much better in the past when presidents were decent and honorable people and all the awful acts by the current president are just an aberration that we must endure until he leaves office and the dignity of the office is restored by a new person.

In reality Bush was as awful as any other president, endorsing racist sentiments, committing war crimes, obstructing justice, and being a serial sexual abuser. And let us not forget his tenure as head of the CIA when it was, as it is undoubtedly now, involved in all manner of dubious activities that he oversaw. Although his family is from Maine and upper class WASPs, he chose to make his political home in Texas and adopted a faux southern persona and freely espoused the regressive political positions of that region. He laid the groundwork for Donald Trump and not all the hagiography that is gushing out of the media can completely hide that aspect of his legacy.

The rose-tinted view of Bush that is being thrust down our throats is the same kind of forced amnesia that is now trying to persuade people that the FBI was bad in the past in the way it violated people’s civil liberties and hounded to their death those involved in civil rights and antiwar movements but is honorable now, or that the CIA may in the past have been murdering people, including foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, and running drugs but it is also much more honorable now. This is most pronounced now as some Democrats and liberals have suddenly started praising these two organizations mainly because they are seen as not wholly supportive of Trump.

These are all bedtime stories to make people feel good about themselves by seeing the current state of events as an aberration, a deviation from the high standards of the past. In reality, it is more than likely that the FBI and CIA have not changed in the slightest but we will not know what they are up to currently until much later, when all their criminal activities will again be portrayed as an aberration of the past.