Exit Bush

This time next week, we'll have a new U.S. president (perhaps you've heard).
The inauguration parties will be breaking up, and we'll be in a new
political era. I shan't be celebrating much myself: a quick toast to old
Bush, and good luck to the new Obama (there seems to be a new one every
day). Then back to reading Ausonius.

No predictions today; I intend to look only backwards.

I was young and callow then (now, at least, I'm no longer young), when
Pierre Trudeau was installed as Canada's 15th prime minister. I was, well,
15 myself, and already beginning to recover from Trudeaumania. I'd worked my
little behind off for the Liberals (can you believe it?) and had had the
honour of meeting the Great Man. I think it was in the moment I looked into
his icy blue eyes that my enthusiasm began to relax.

Still vaguely remember: the attitudes among such of my elders as did not
like or trust him, in the moments immediately before the Great Man took
power, and the foreseeable catastrophe began. People think, "Nah, this isn't
going to be so bad. In fact he's going to be like every other prime
minister." And anyway, the whole thing happens in slow motion.

Let us complete the highly unoriginal observation. The lobster hardly
notices the temperature rising in his pot. Time passes. And what has
changed, after all? Before he was green, afterwards orange. But it's the
same lobster!

Not everyone agrees that the Trudeau years were a disaster for Canada. My
own view is based on a candid assessment of the before and after, and it is
the view of a lobster. From the point of view of the diner, in our Nanny
State, much was improved by expending the country's moral capital.

But you know me, gentle reader: I tend to disregard received opinion, itself
a transient product of passing history. This includes, to return briefly to
the present, the view that George W. Bush was, if not the worst president
the United States ever had, at least the worst in living memory.

He has been demonized, in the progressive media and among the progressive
classes -- to the point where even those who are inclined to defend him,
instinctively flinch. Which is to say: he has been demonized by people who
do not concern themselves overmuch with the question, "What would you have
done in his position, instead," given each successive crisis he faced. Or,
when asked that question, they reply in some rhetorical way that betrays no
serious interest in the likely consequences of the alternative course.

I have found that one cannot argue with history: things happened just as
they did. But also, one cannot argue with people who are not anchored in
prudential reasoning.

After eight years of him, I would say, that of all the U.S. presidents in my
life (from Eisenhower forward), Mr. Bush has been the most impressive,
except Reagan. This is mostly a judgment on his foreign policy, in which --
instant history requires cliches -- he has taken various bulls by their
horns, and has not been flipped by them.

I think it will be seen more clearly, as hindsight develops, that the stand
he took in Afghanistan, then Iraq, prevented the exponential growth of
Islamism. Ditto: his refusal to be horse-whipped by international public
opinion very far along the ridiculous "roadmap to peace" between Israel and
her fanatic adversaries. His confrontational attitudes toward other rogue
regimes held the line -- against Libya, Syria, North Korea, and even Iran.
We would be in a far worse position if such regimes had been persuaded that
America really was a "paper tiger."

Mr. Bush, as the saying goes, "kept America safe," and in so doing, defended
universal Western interests. We are all indebted not only to him, but to the
American taxpayer, and American soldiers, for missions to which we did not
contribute adequately. Forward positions were taken and maintained. It
remains to be seen whether Mr. Obama will give all these positions away.

In domestic policy, as Mr. Bush has himself been confessing in final
interviews and a rather moving final press conference, he very likely
sacrificed too much. His own free-market instincts, and his sense of the
limitations of the U.S. federal government, were overcome in the course of
various tax-and-spend responses to domestic problems over-magnified in the
media. More precisely, spend alone, for he did fight taxes, and thereby left
(as Reagan before him) a legacy of public indebtedness. At least this will
crimp his successor.

No matter how he is depicted, the man himself has been honest, thoughtful,
courageous, modest -- and remarkably free of personal vindictiveness. He has
done consistently what he thought right under the circumstances, from a far
broader view of those circumstances than his vindictive enemies have
acknowledged, or would be able to acknowledge.

David Warren