Wehrwolfen
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- May 22, 2012
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Bush Reconsidered
Weve reached the point for some perspective on the much-derided 43rd president.
Victor Davis Hanson @ NRO:
George W. Bush left office in January 2009 with one of the lowest job-approval ratings for a president (34 percent) since Gallup started compiling them as compared to Harry Trumans low of 32 percent, Richard Nixons of 24 percent, and Jimmy Carters of 34 percent and to the general derision of the media.
At times the venom accorded Bush in popular culture reached absurd and even sick levels. Alfred A. Knopf, for example, infamously published Nicholson Bakers Checkpoint, a pathetic riff on shooting Bush. Gabriel Ranges unhinged 2006 docudrama, The Death of a President, focused on an imagined assassination of President Bush (imagine the outcry should any filmmaker today update thattopos). A sick Charlie Brooker op-ed in the Guardian called for another John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald to kill Bush. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic more or less permanently ruined his reputation by writing an adolescent rant on the case for Bush hatred, one that began creepily with I hate President George W. Bush. Try substituting another presidents name for Bushs and see what the reaction of The New Republic would be.
All that hysteria once led to Charles Krauthammers identification of Bush Derangement Syndrome a pathology in which the unbalanced seemed to channel all their anxieties, frustrations, and paranoias onto George W. Bush. And yet, following 9/11, Bush had calmly led the nation and enjoyed one of the highest positive appraisals of any president since the advent of modern polling, when for months he registered a 90 percent approval rating; indeed, he averaged a 62 percent approval rating over his first four years.
Yet, as with all presidents, with time and a successor come perspective. So it is not hard to see why the out-of-office Bushs likability ratings are slowly inching back up most recently to 46 percent. For reflection on Bushs eight years in office, take a look back at the six aspects of his presidency that harmed his popularity most Iraq and its attendant controversies, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, the so-called Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, the September 2008 financial meltdown, the chronic budget deficits, and the general impression that Bush was singularly inarticulate and prone to embarrassing gaffes.
Bush lied, thousands died, was a popular mantra that followed from the absence of stockpiles of WMD in Saddam Husseins Iraq the chief casus belli of the Iraq War. But looking back, quite apart from the politics of the moment, we now remember that Congress had approved 23 writs authorizing the removal of Saddam Hussein. The pro-war speeches of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were simply amplifications of President Clintons signing into law of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, in which were outlined in graphic detail the dangers of the Hussein WMD arsenal. We do not know what exactly happened to those weapons, but perhaps the end sometime soon of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria amid rampant rumors of a sizable WMD depot could shed some light on prior cross-border traffic between Assad and Hussein. More important, Saddam Husseins oil-rich Iraq never became another North Korea or Iran. His removal also had a salutary effect in convincing Moammar Qaddafi to dismantle his own WMD program, and may have helped to convince Assad to leave Lebanon. In any case, Saddam was the first of many Middle Eastern strongmen to fall.
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