President George Bush's name came up once during the Democratic debate, in context of his recent ballgame appearance with leftist television host Ellen DeGeneres, which drew some criticism based on how dumb it was.

Where Bush's ghost really came up, though, but not with his name, was in Democrats blasting President Trump for pulling U.S. troops out of the Middle East.

Democrats, with the exception of insignificant Tulsi Gabbard, all adopted the Bush position of endless wars for the sake of other nations.  Keeping our word.  Loyalty.  Cut and run.  Democracy in every beating heart of every nation or whatever.  It all pretty much came up.

How things change.

Here's Joe Biden:

"It's been the most shameful thing any president has done in modern history in terms of foreign policy," former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said.

Here's Pete Buttigieg:

"What we were doing in Syria was keeping our word," Mr. Buttigieg said. "Part of what makes it possible for the United States to get people to put their lives on the line to back us up is the idea that we will back them up, too."

"When I was deployed, not just the Afghan national army forces but the janitors put their lives on the line just by working with U.S. forces," he continued. "I would have a hard time today looking an Afghan civilian or soldier in the eye after what just happened over there."

Here's Bernie Sanders:

"Now you tell me what country in the world will trust the word of the president of the United States?" Mr. Sanders said. "In other words, what he has done is wreck our ability to do foreign policy, to do military policy, because nobody in the world will believe this pathological liar."

This is Bush-think, and precisely the reason Americans eventually went for Trump in 2016.  Back when Bush was getting us into supposedly quickie wars, the ones that would convert people with stone-age values into Jeffersonian democrats, leftists were on the outside at the time. yelling about "Bushwars," war crimes, and bringing the troops home.  Remember Cindy Sheehan?  I remember how she spoke at one of those ANSWER-sponsored events in Hollywood, denouncing George Bush and demanding the troops be brought home.  The lefties were in their element, holding anti-war demonstrations with coffins and Afghani and Iraqi flags, yelling, "No, no, we won't go" and chanting "no war for oil."  They held up pictures of bombed out little kids.  Remember the smirking chimp? 

How things change.  Today it's Trump pulling the troops out and far-left Democrats adopting the Bush position, wars without end, keeping the status quo, keeping it all the same, claiming we have allies to defend.  (As if we can't hand the Kurds ,who really did help us, and far from all did, some visas.)  I'm not a big Bush-hater — I think he did what he thought was right at the time — but right now, at this late date, we all know this didn't work.

For Democrats, it's never a problem to adopt a policy (or ideology) that has a well known record of failure.

In adopting this full-on flip-for-Bush position, Democrats seem to have missed why Americans eventually came to vote for President Trump, who's tired of wasting U.S. lives and resources on the Middle East's nonstop tribal conflicts and vainly hoping they'll all turn democratic.  In a bid to Get Trump, they're now making themselves the Bushies.

Somewhere, George Bush is smiling.