Revisionist History - George W. Bush Edition

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Revisionist history is nothing new.  As they say the winners write history.  We saw it with Ronald Reagan.  Shortly after he left office the process began to white wash the negatives and invent positives.  He is giving credit for ending the cold war and bringing down the Soviet Union - not true.  The fact that he began the process of bringing down the US economy by destroying the middle class is white washed.  Now the revisionist history begins after George W. Bush has been out of office for almost a year.  It begins perhaps with Caroline Glick on the day the ground was broken on the Bush library.  She manages to miss GWB and do a hit piece on Obama at the same time.

It hurts to hear about an American President who cares deeply and
sincerely about wounded soldiers and soldiers murdered in a terrorist
attack and know that he is not the American President. It isn't so much
that I miss Bush personally. I had a lot of criticism about his
policies - particularly in his last two years in office after he
effectively abdicated his leadership of global affairs to Condoleezza
Rice and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington.

But at least
you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans.
You knew that he valued America's allies even if he didn't always do
right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You
can't say any of that about his successor. And it hurts. It hurts that
Barack Hussein Obama's first statement about the massacre at Fort Hood
was so emotionally cut off from what happened. It hurts that he thought
the most important thing to say about the massacre is that we mustn't
jump to conclusions about the motivations of the terrorist who killed
his fellow soldiers despite the fact that he was screaming Allah Akhbar
as he shot them. It hurts that Obama and his wife treat soldiers like
losers who all suffer from PTSD and that the greatest service he can
render them is to provide them with free psychiatric care and send them
home from Iraq and Afghanistan without first securing victory.

I'm not going to comment on this offensive nonsense because Daniel Larison did a much better job than I could.

Yes, this is what you would expect from Glick (or from anyone, for
that matter, who thinks that the last two years of Bush�s foreign
policy were his worst), but it�s offensive all the same. As tempting
and easy as it would be to turn this formulation around on one of the
worst Presidents of all time, I don�t assume that Bush did any of the
things he did because he didn�t have �American values� or didn�t love
his country. I don�t assume that he trashed our relations with Europe,
Turkey and Russia because he wanted America to be isolated or because
he loathed these other nations. It is certainly true that he harmed
American interests, weakened American power, wrecked our fiscal house
and isolated us from many of our allies and potential partners, but the
world is full of stories of people who harm that which they love.
Bush�s problem wasn�t that he didn�t love America. The problem was that
he had no idea what he was doing and substituted ideological fantasies
in place of understanding.

Indeed, most of his catastrophic blunders came from an excess of
sentiment and emotion concerning these things, combined with absolutely
incompetent execution and an ideological obsession with American virtue
and strength that ensured that his actions would be excessive,
arrogant, ill-conceived and unrelated to the real world. Bush�s love of
country was something similar to what the Apostle called in another
context �zeal not according to knowledge.� The man was actually
overflowing with saccharine, do-gooding, Gersonian sentimentality and
he had no shortage of emotional, demonstrative professions of patriotic
devotion. So what? What good did it do anyone? It might even have been
better had Bush been less enthusiastic in trying to protect the United
States, since he would not have been so ready to see dire threats
around every corner where none existed. America needs fewer paranoid,
jealous lovers, not more.

I think even Larison is giving Bush too much credit.  He was an incompetent power hungry sociopath.  He didn't love this country he only loved himself.  Bush was a C-Street president who was convinced that he had been chosen by God.