In an interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the speaker if Democrats’ efforts to remind the public that it was the policies of George W. Bush that led to the various crises facing the country is a smart political strategy:

Asked how much longer Democrats should continue to blame Bush, Pelosi replied: “Well, it burns out when the problems go away. And here’s what the president inherited. He inherited a deficit, when this president [Bush] inherited from the Clinton administration four budgets that were either in surplus or in balance. And he turned it into a massive deficit. He … brought us to the brink of a financial crisis. He brought us to the brink of deep recession, ignoring issues that relate to climate change.”

It’s not surprising that Washington Republicans and Beltway media types like Chuck Todd don’t want Democrats to remind Americans what happened during the Bush years — they were complicit in his downfall, to one degree or another.

Republicans in Congress rubberstamped Bush’s anti-regulatory policies and deficit spending on war, Medicare and other Big Government conservative programs. They stood by while he, Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice turned the United States into a torture regime.

For their part, Washington journalists watched in mute silence while the Bush regime launched the invasion of Iraq based on false claims about Iraq’s weapons capabilities — they even treated Cheney’s deliberate betrayal of national security when he outed a secret CIA anti-WMD program as just another political game — and in the rare instances when Bush, Dick Cheney and others submitted to interviews, reporters allowed them to spout their talking points and spin and never confronted them over their lies, even when American lives were at stake and billions of taxpayer dollars were being wasted, as was the case in the occupation of Iraq.

In one sense, George Bush has led a charmed life. Before entering politics, he’d experienced a series of failures in business as well as his personal life for which he was never held accountable. Even as president, he escaped impeachment or even a reprimand for his colossal mistakes. After presiding over an administration that was rife with ineptitude and malfeasance, he left office without having accomplished anything of consequence. Since then, Bush aides like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, along with the Cheneys, have been pushing hard to rewrite the history of Bush’s failed presidency.

For history’s sake, it’s important that Democrats and reality-based journalists keep the facts about the Bush administration’s record in the public narrative. This may seem harsh to Republican pols and Beltway media types who were in on it with him, but consider this: Being blamed for the crises he caused is the only reckoning, the only accounting, George Bush will ever receive for bringing a once-great nation to its knees.

The political advantage in reminding the public about the Bush years is that it puts Democrats on offense — in politics, if you’re on offense, you are usually winning. On defense, Republicans must either defend Bush against charges of incompetence, lying and the rest, or they can agree with Democrats that Bush, whom they enabled, did indeed cause the catastrophes we face.

But mainly there’s this: If Democrats don’t remind voters who crashed America’s systems, Republicans will spend every waking minute between now and November using their vast right-wing noise machine to falsely pin the blame on Pres. Obama and the Democrats, which is neither accurate or fair.

Despite the protests of Republicans and their supporters in the media like Chuck Todd, George Bush does not deserve a pass now or in the future. There is no statute of limitations on his responsibility for what he did as president. His failures are his legacy, and it is richly deserved.

Besides, why cry for George Bush. He doesn’t give a damn about how he’ll be remembered a century from now.

As he once said to Bob Woodward, “History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”