all throughout Obama's 8 years, anytime someone brought up a failed promise, the eternal wars, or the deportations or anything, what we were told was, "Bush would have made it worse."

We were? I mean, that's not what I remember being told. Not because libs were above that (obviously), but rather it doesn't make any sense. Bush got his 2 terms. Bush already succeeded in being the greater evil and was out of the picture regardless of who took the reins in the white house in 2008. I know what you're saying doesn't necessarily mean this, but a few times now I've seen hexbears talk as though Bush was voted out in favor of Obama. This is not what happened. Bush was never voted out, and Obama never ran against Bush. John McCain was the Republican nominee (and a big argument of the libs at the time was that he was unfit for office because he was too old and frail, lmao, the irony right?). And after McCain lost to Obama, the liberal response still wasn't even that McCain would have been worse. You really only see that kind of talk (at least in my experience) directed at potential future threats, which obviously Bush no longer was after he won his 2nd term in 2004. It was simply taken as a given that Bush had been worse because it was his fault that poor Obama had to clean up his mess.

No, the way the liberals, especially Democrats defended against people pointing out the reality that Obama's increased drone strikes, continued use of torture, and especially the neverending wars, was not to say Bush would have been worse but simply to say "Well Bush started it, which was unjust, but now that we're in it, we have to win it." There wasn't even a pretense at "Bush would have been worse" because all they had to do was blame it all on Bush to begin with. "Obama inherited a terrible situation, a quagmire we're in thanks to Bush. But what are we supposed to do now, just give Afghanistan to the Taliban? What, do you side with the terrorists?"

And about drone strikes, the defense I remember seeing all the time, was that they were more humane than what Bush did. "Drone strikes don't risk American troops the way Bush did, and really they're so much more effective at getting the baddies who never even see them coming! It's 'unfortunate' that there has been innocent children hit, but that's just 'collateral damage.'" It was shocking (to me, being more naive at the time) how freely and without reflection the Democrats took up the exact same rhetoric that they had correctly railed against when the Republicans used it. The Republican neocons having practically invented "collateral damage" as a popular euphemism was embraced by the Democrats immediately after they came to power.

a lib president could admit to dropping a biological weapon on china that specifically targets children and every paper would declare him the greatest and most loving humanitarian since Jesus.

Totally. Remember that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize after ramping up so many of Bush's warcrimes.