During the recent torrent of pillow-soft interviews with former president George Bush, Fox News hosts such as Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy appeared willing to tolerate all sorts of disconnects in the name of never closely questioning Bush about his eight years in office.

For instance, note this exchange as Bush remembered visiting the World Trade Center rubble, just days after it was attacked by terrorist:

KILMEADE: You saw it on video. But then you saw it in person. What was the big difference?

BUSH: When I went there, it was just -- I mean, all the senses were overwhelmed by the devastation. I mean you're sloshing through water and curtain of --

DOOCY: Sure.

BUSH: -- dust and dirt and the smell of the burnt buildings. It was just unbelievable. I mean it was like going into hell. And I get down in there and there's these men and women who are just searching for their buddies and there was a palpable blood lust and they wanted something done.

…

DOOCY: You say if I had to summarize in one sentence, my most important accomplishment as president, it would be --

BUSH: Protecting the homeland.

If you picked up the obvious disconnect between Bush boasting about “protecting the homeland” during the same interview in which he detailed the hellish remains at the World Trade Center where Americans fell victim to the country's worst terrorist attack while Bush was president, then you shouldn't be watching Fox News. And you definitely should not be interviewing the former president while hosting a program on Fox News.

The fact that Fox News hosts, for the most part, were embarrassingly ingratiating towards Bush during his seemingly endless book tour sit-downs wasn't especially newsworthy. Fox News anchors for quite some time have shown almost no inclination in terms of knowing how to practice traditional journalism, so there was no reason to think the likes of Sean Hannity would suddenly discover the subtler points of the newsmaker Q&A while sitting awe-struck across from Bush. ("You've become a little bit like a rock star!")

And sadly it wasn't that surprising that in the caring hands of his Fox News interviewers, Bush was allowed to dissemble on rather significant points of his presidential past.

That's what everyone expected, including Bush and his handlers and the Fox News team as well as its viewers. That's what everyone expected, and that's what they got: A warm bath of Bush nostalgia. (The interview sessions often felt much more like modern day version of This is Your Life.)

It was a Bush bubble bath where words and phrases like “Katrina,” “Gallup,” and “Walter Reed” were virtually banned during an avalanche of Bush myth-making. I know, Fox News goes easy on former Republican president. Shocking, right?

But what has been more telling, and worth closer observation, is the larger role Fox News now plays in ever-expanding parallel universe that is the GOP Noise Machine, where unique sets of partisan 'facts' are eagerly embraced. Like the fact that two million people showed up for the big Tea Party march on Washington, D.C., in September, 2009, that Obama's health care reform included death panels, and that the president's recent trip to India cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion.

Now with the Bush interviews, Fox News expanded its role into sort of a Ministry of Information and moved to officially whitewash the past and reposition the future.

In other words, Bush's presidency was a success. Bush cared about the American people. He's a patriot who loves his father. Bush didn't want to invade Iraq but had no choice. He gave his all. And Bush wanted badly to capture Osama bin Laden.

But it's really the sheer repetition of the myth-making that was so striking as you go back and review the hour-after-hour of reverential Fox News interviews; the robotic way Bush was asked to retell just a handful of the same stories over and over for the Fox News audience.

Like the fateful moment inside the Sarasota, Fla., classroom when Bush was made aware that a second terrorist plane had struck the World Trade Center:

And I remember sitting in the classroom thinking about the attack. And looking at the little child who was reading to me and realizing that my job was to protect that person. And that person's family and neighbors.

And:

I look at the child or the children and it's I'm going protect you. And you know, all of a sudden the phone calls and they are all getting calls.

It was obvious they were getting calls told the same thing I was told by Andy. I decided, I made the decision, not to jump up and create a chaotic scene, but wait for an appropriate moment.

And:

And then I looked at the kids, and my role as president became clarified, and that is my job was to protect the American people. And all of a sudden, in the back of the room, people started getting the phone calls, the press. And I knew my reactions were being recorded, and I decided to wait for the appropriate moment to leave the classroom.

And:

And then I saw the kids. I was looking at the kids with my -- I focused on the kids. And their innocence contrasted with the evil of those who would attack America.

…

And then I saw the press corps in the back of the room, the press pool, starting to get on their cell phones and I realized that it was important that I maintain a sense of calm. So I made the decision not to jump up.

And did I mention Bush's presidency was a success?

To me, that was the absolutely central message that Fox News wanted to drive home to its viewers. Not necessarily to the real world, but to its core audience of right-wing believers who have signaled they will buy whatever alternative version of reality Fox News is selling.

The reason it's so important for Fox news to push the revisionist idea that Bush's presidency was a homerun is because Fox News, of course, was deeply vested in the Bush administration and vouched for his actions for eight years. But also, Fox News today needs to prop up Bush as a counter to the Obama presidency, which Fox News on a daily basis now condemns as a crime against democracy and against America.

If Obama is the Manchurian Candidate with secret alliances to dark, anti-American forces, and if Obama “has a different belief system than most Americans,” as Fox News chief Roger Ailes claimed this week, then Bush, we're told, is Obama's mirror opposite; a model for all that is right and true and virtuous in a United States president. The fact that Bush was, according to polling firms, the most disliked president in modern American history? Well, that's a problem. And that's why the Bush book tour was so important to Fox News and the larger media cabal of Obama haters.

It was a chance for Fox News to at least convince its own viewers that Bush remains, in fact, a larger-than-life hero.

And remember, today's Fox News is not the same outlet that aired 24/7 during the Bush presidency. During most of the previous decade, Fox News was an openly conservative news platform that clearly skewed its programming to the right. But today's Fox News, which essentially debuted the week Obama was inaugurated and the week Glenn Beck went on the air in 2009, is a radically partisan and nakedly political version.

The former president's book push represented the first time the new, more radical Fox News was able to engage with Bush and was able to apply its TV muscle in terms of aggressively brandishing his image and rewriting history.

The results from the mini-Bush marathon on Fox News? It's now a 'fact' that the Bush presidency was a run-away succes.