This week, I've been reading George W. Bush's book. (We all have.) It brings up lots of points of (to me) contention — over the handling of Iraq and Afghanistan and torture, to name the big three — but I want to focus on two things here. One is something that many others have also commented on: the man's basic decency. It's something that those who knew and worked with him brought up again and again, especially in the face of the brutal character-assassination campaign that dogged him for the latter half of his presidency. Unless the man is a spectacular liar and hypocrite, I'm inclined to believe that those who knew him were being honest on this point, however dishonest they were on matters of policy. His book makes that clear. George W. Bush is simply not a mean or devious character. He is not a Nixon. He has not and is not waging some shameless post-presidency battle to clear his name and canonize himself, as Nixon did. He does not blame others for his errors; he admits and accepts responsibility for them. On contentious decisions in which he believes he was right, he does not accuse his detractors of being fools and schemers; he defends what he did. However much anyone may think he failed — and let me be clear, I think he failed horribly on many things — an elemental Nixonian falsity wasn't the cause.
The second point is that, in the public/pundit battle to define Bush's legacy, it's largely been forgotten that quite a lot of what Bush did as president was not terribly controversial, was in fact...
Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/emo-conservative-commentariat-111210?src=rss
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