W is for well done

Earlier this week I referred to a quote by Ann Coulter about the respect conservatives should give Obama - about the same as they gave to Bush. In other words - absolutely none whatsoever. To be fair, though, over on the Opinion Journal there is a positive article about Bush by a former member of John Kerry's team in 2004, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.

Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House.

I tend to agree with that. The bare bones of the financial crisis which has engulfed the world were laid down during Clinton's tenure.

Whatever your views on global warming and Kyoto, the criticism of Bush for not signing the treaty should be balanced by the fact that Clinton didn't either - but at least the US rate of CO2 emissions declined under Bush, which is more than can be said for the majority of nations that did sign the treaty. It's one of the hallmarks of the Bush presidency - while everyone else talked the talk, he actually walked the walk.

Same with poverty. Our government and the UN did all the chat, but even Saint Bob Geldof was forced to concede that nobody - ever - has done more for Africa than George W Bush. All this while dealing with the biggest political issues in a generation. Once again, the soft lefties of Europe wrung their hands and delivered earnest platitudes - Bush just delivered.

And what about the foreign policies? Well, Iraq has been a success - even the most hardened left wing self-loathers are having to admit that now. Far from the "quagmire" they were predicting Iraq has been a significant achievement. I know it'll be a shit hole in no time at all once we're out of there, but you can't have everything. Afghanistan was always the "just" war for the lefties - probably the reason we decided to stay there - but now that is the quagmire. It was always going to be a fruitless exercise - you can't civilise people who don't want to be civilised. Afghanistan remains a 12th century feudal outpost and will stay that way until they decide they want to join the rest of the world.

I don't know much about US politics - the economy, standard of living or what have you - but I do know that millions of illegal immigrants can't be wrong. If the USA was really such a crap place under Bush, why did so many people flock there - including hundreds of thousands from the "enlightened" European nations? Germany, Italy and other EU nations have a population in free fall - the USA just keeps getting bigger. The "land of the free" appears to be a bigger draw than the "land of the freebie".

Bush was never as bad a President as the media would have you believe - just as JFK was never as good as they try to make out (hey, no one came closer to bringing nuclear holocaust down on us all). Bush's problem is that he was faced by a malevolent media from the outset. A media who, more often than not, sided with our enemies rather than be seen to support George W Bush.

I've no doubt that, eventually, someone, somewhere will sit down and write a proper unbiased review of the last eight years and find that, far from being the worst President ever, Bush responded to the worst attack on it's soil since Pearl Harbor in a decisive and correct manner and kept his country safe from harm for the next seven years while conducting a successful campaign against the enemy in their own lands.

Well done, Mr Bush.