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Some of our favorites see off George W. Bush. Charles Krauthammer first.
Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman’s rehabilitation took decades. Bush’s will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama.
Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds — the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition. It’s not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It’s the continuity of policy.
It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned.
It is the great care Obama is taking in not preemptively abandoning the anti-terror infrastructure that the Bush administration leaves behind. …
Thomas Sowell is next.
Whatever history’s verdict on the Bush administration might be, it is likely to be very different from what we hear from the talking heads on television or read from the know-it-alls on editorial pages.
President Bush’s number one achievement was also the number one function of government— to protect its citizens. Nobody on September 11, 2001 believed that there would never be another such attack for more than seven years.
Unfortunately, people who are protected from dangers often conclude that there are no dangers. This is most painfully visible among those Americans who are hysterical over the government’s intercepting international phone calls, in order to disrupt international terrorist networks. …
From the day President Bush took office, the long knives were out for him – in ways they will not (and should not) be out for President-elect Barack Obama. The chattering class saw Dubya as a walking style crime in a cowboy suit. They hit Bush for everything – for the way he mangled syntax, for the books he read, because he worked out too much.
Note now that the buff Obama is taking office, stories gushing about Obama’s daily workouts flood the channels. Oh, yes, and the same people who belittled Bush for sending troops to war even though he only served in the National Guard somehow do not seem to notice Obama’s utter lack of military experience.
To trash Bush was to belong. There was little upside in supporting Bush, even if you had supported his agenda.
Most of the Democratic candidates for president in 2004 and 2008 voted for the Patriot Act – and then campaigned against it. They voted for the resolution authorizing U.S. military force in Iraq – then bolted from the war itself. Likewise with No Child Left Behind. Somehow Bush was the guy who looked bad as he withstood the heat, while his caving critics preened. …
Today, three of our favorites stop to say nice things about the outgoing prez. Would you believe the NY Times has done the same? Last weekend they paid tribute to his success in India.
Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on earth. But India’s prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.
“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Mr. Singh told Mr. Bush in Washington in September, “and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”
Laura Bush is not alone, after all.
Among the least coveted jobs in the world today, along with grave digging, is the task of burnishing President Bush’s foreign legacy: the complex, competing challenges of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, China and what many in Europe and the third world see as a tarnished national brand.
But love is an unpredictable thing, and it is possible that the love-fest stoked by Mr. Singh and Mr. Bush will, with time, come to be seen as President Bush’s enduring overseas accomplishment: the cultivation of India, long prickly about empires, as a partner of the sole superpower. …
Of course, the above mentioned NY Times article makes sure to slap Bush around some, so the author can maintain his bona fides in the community of the great media elite. All of that tiresome claptrap goes to ridiculous lengths in a Newsweek piece co-authored by Stuart Taylor and Evan Thomas, in which this appeared;
… Last summer, the U.S. Senate (with Obama absent) voted to require the CIA to use no interrogation methods other than those permitted in the Army Field Manual. These are extremely restrictive: strictly speaking, the interrogator cannot ever threaten bodily harm or even put a prisoner on cold rations until he talks. Bush vetoed this measure, not unwisely. …
Get that? The authors couldn’t write; Bush wisely vetoed this measure. The words Bush and wisely cannot appear together. The default judgement is that if Bush did it, it was unwise. So if in fact he got something right, they will say he was - not unwise.
Jonah Goldberg has fun with Blago and Burris.
The Democrats are folding like an ironing board over this Roland Burris business, and for some reason people are surprised.
Just to catch up: The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is in scalding-hot water over allegations he wanted to sell Barack Obama’s still-warm Senate seat. This was discovered via federal wiretaps of the helmet-haired governor’s phone conversations and fueled by some juicy dialogue better suited for fleet week in Manila.
In response, Senate Democrats took a Churchillian stand, vowing that no Blago appointee would ever be accepted by the Senate. No appointee, the Democrats insisted, so tainted with scandal could be allowed to sit in the same chamber that Ted Kennedy calls home.
The party of the infinitely elastic “living Constitution” suddenly planted their flag of principle in the terra firma of constitutional concrete and watched it flap in the hot wind of their political bloviation. Even after Blagojevich announced he was appointing Roland Burris, a respected but unremarkable black Illinois politician, to Obama’s seat, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada stood his ground, pronouncing the move “unacceptable.”
But that resolve melted like a Hershey bar in a Nevada parking lot the moment Mr. Burris came to Washington. Apparently, the Constitution wasn’t on the Democrats’ side (Fancy that!) and liberals lacked the stomach to stand in the doorway of the Capitol and block admittance of a black man. …
Mark Perry at Carpe Diem has a great post on the continuing reduction in the costs of living.
I have been purchasing some old Sears and Montgomery Wards catalogs on Ebay to have accurate, historical retail price data on typical consumer goods in various years, and then be able to compare the prices consumers pay today for various household goods to prices in previous periods, measured in the number of minutes or hours worked at the average wage to earn enough money to purchase the items. …
The globalony fraud is becoming apparent in the hinterlands. Flint, MI Journal with details. Now we must pray for global warming.
… Based on core samples from Russia’s Vostok Station in Antarctica, we now know earth’s atmosphere and temperature for the last 420,000 years. This evidence suggests that the 12,000 years of warmth we call the Holocene period is over.
Apparently, we’re headed into an ice age of about 100,000 years — give or take. As for CO2 levels, core samples show conclusively they follow the earth’s temperature rise, not lead it.
It turns out CO2 fluctuations follow the change in sea temperature. As water temperatures rise, oceans release additional dissolved CO2 — like opening a warm brewsky.
To think, early last year, liberals suggested we spend 45 trillion dollars and give up five million jobs to fix global warming. But there is good news: now that we don’t have to spend any of that money, we can give it all to the banks.