One of James Taranto's tongue-in-cheek tropes at his Best of the Web Today column is "We Blame George Bush." As Wikipedia describes it, the trope "is a play on the perceived tendency for many of his detractors to lay the blame for pretty much anything" on Bush. In a recent example, "We Blame George W. Bush" was placed over a headline reading “Slipping Into a Food Coma? Blame Your Gut Microbes.”
And lo and behold, from today's Morning Joe comes a real-life example of the phenomenon. Mika Brzezinski blamed Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from the US, on in part—you guessed it—George W. Bush. Mika argued that foreign policy blunders not just by the Obama administration but "by the George W. Bush administration" created feelings that Trump is tapping into with his proposal. For Mika to reach back to blame Bush for Trump's proposal, when even liberals praise him for going out of his way, for example, six days after 9-11, to declare "Islam is peace," etc. is something between outrageous and hilarious.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: What scares me is that our sort of shock and for me this is for the first time I'm sort of lnervous about what I'm watching to be very honest. I think he actually had really broad appeal and I mentioned a week ago or so I thought he was squandering that for the general. That he really had a kind of a momentum whether you agreed with it or not. I think he still does. And what scares me about this is that he is a pretty brilliant man and knows how to tap into how, what people are feeling and saying. And there is a vacuum, there is an opening for this created not just by the Obama administration but by the George W. Bush administration. The events of the past decade have really made this country ripe for these feelings and he's tapping into them.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: But George W. Bush as well as Dick Cheney and his statement we just showed, aggressively spoke out against this type of rhetoric.
MIKA: That's great.
JOE: It is great.
MIKA: But why this vaccum exists, it's everything that's been happening in terms of foreign policy, endless wars, the continued problem in Syria, and ISIS hitting here at home, this is all not just popping up out of nowhere.
