Bernard Sanders, the socialist Senator from Vermont, is rewriting history to almost literally frame the George W. Bush presidency so that the record suits his tastes:

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has agreed to change the wording on the plaque accompanying a portrait of President George W. Bush in response to a complaint by Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.).

[…]

The plaque reads: “Expecting that the success of his presidency would hinge, as it had when he was governor, on his negotiating skills and ability to solve problems, Bush found his two terms in office were instead marked by a series of catastrophic events: the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina; and a financial crisis during his last months in office.”

Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” wrote a letter to National Portrait Gallery Director Martin Sullivan on Jan. 7 complaining about the phrase, “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

On Monday, Sullivan wrote back to Sanders, saying that the plaque would be changed.

The words “led to” will be removed.

So the attacks of September 11 now had nothing to do with the war in Afghanistan either. In a few (very few) generations our children’s children will be writing papers about that horrible day in the fall of 2001 when pilot error killed 3000 Americans and that more horrible day a few months later when the U.S. President firebombed Afghanistan to open up the first front in the Halliburton War.

Sure, Barack Obama’s sticking to President Bush’s national security policies is, in its way, a vindication of those policies. But only for those who supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to begin with. Everyone else is more than happy to pretend that the continuation of the same wars under a new president is really an indication of a new age of American cooperation, diplomacy, and engagement (whatever that means). And if some socialist from Vermont has the opportunity to chip in and distort history, he’ll jump at it.