Bush in review

Every president has a legacy, whether he wants it or not. A legacy isn’t just what people remember; it is also the judgment of history. Presidents have always been, and will always be, remembered by people for their accomplishments, their failures, and for things that happened during their administrations. History remembers them on a greater moral plane of right versus wrong.
No doubt if George W. Bush’s haters have their way, history will only judge the 43rd President of the United States on the things that he did wrong or that went wrong during his presidency. But a more objective examination of the legacy of George W. Bush reveals some things that he got right as well as some things that he got wrong during his eight years in office.
As with the 42 previous commanders-in-chief before him, George W. Bush didn’t always do the right thing; but he didn’t always do the wrong thing, either. He ought to be judged fairly as a president, rather than with subjective bias.
Since the very day George W. Bush was first sworn in as President, the political left has been leveling an unceasing litany of criticisms against him; some justified, but most not so much. He could never do anything right as far as the haters were concerned. He might as well have been a dead president walking, and treated as though he was on death row, because he was condemned long before he even took the oath of office and had a chance to do anything—right or wrong.
It all started during the 2000 Republican presidential primary when the haters compared George W. to his father and former President George H.W. Bush, our nation’s 41st commander-in-chief. I remember distinctly that candidate Bush’s critics called him “wishy-washy” like his father. They said he would never be able to make decisions on his own and that the elder Bush would always be looking over his son’s shoulder.
From there, he went from being called his father’s clone to a corrupt oil man who paid off the United States Supreme Court and bought the 2000 General Election. This, of course, was in response to a weeks-long challenge by the Gore Campaign over Florida’s contested 25 electoral votes. Despite multiple recounts, the request for still another was finally denied by then-Florida Secretary of State Katharine Harris, who had determined that there had been enough recounts and it was time to certify the election. Her decision, though, was then appealed by the Gore Campaign to the Florida Supreme Court, which sided with Gore and overruled the Secretary of State, allowing yet another recount to proceed. At that point, the state Supreme Court’s decision was appealed by the Bush Campaign to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled that the directive of the Florida Secretary of State to certify the election should stand. And, viola, George W. Bush received Florida’s hotly contested 25 electoral votes, which put him over the 270 votes required to win the presidency. And he was sworn in as President No. 43 instead of then-Vice President Al “I created the Internet” Gore.
At that point, the political left’s hatred of Bush had become embedded. And from then on, his enemies pursued a relentless campaign to either have him impeached or impugned beyond repair. They made it their mission in life.
What followed were the accusations that George W. Bush was not a legitimate president; that he was de facto, winning by default, instead of by popular vote. Most on the left—many of the same ones demanding that we recognize Barack Obama as our president—never recognized Bush as the President of the United States.
But then, not even eight months into his presidency, history was thrust upon George W. Bush with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. How the leftists seethed over those first somber days in the aftermath where the country appeared united behind President Bush and his vow to hunt down those responsible for the attacks, as well as those in support of them. Their only chance to thwart a war legacy for Bush was to make that war look bad; that is, worse than it actually was.
And so began Plan B of Operation Bush-wacker, which was to sabotage the war effort and make “Dubya” come out of it all with egg on his face.
Since Day One of the “War On Terror,” the Bush haters lambasted his every move. Things only got worse when Bush decided to invade Iraq, oust Saddam Hussein from power and implement a democratic government. His enemies literally charged him with treason for going to war under false pretenses, and lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s link to al-Qaeda.
The Bush haters called it an unnecessary war. And yet, they conveniently forgot how many United Nations sanctions the former Iraqi dictator violated prior to the Allied invasion that brought an end to his reign of terror. The war’s critics forgot just how many chances former President Bush gave Saddam to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors and how long it took from Bush’s first warning to his last. As I recall, the entire diplomatic effort lasted several months before the president decided it was time to put an end to Saddam’s defiance for good.
The Bush haters also have conveniently forgotten that President Bush received Congressional approval for the invasion. That is, the members of Congress—both Republican and Democrat—had access to and reviewed the same intelligence information that the White House did and apparently came to the same conclusion of Bush: That the probability Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was not only sound, but also evidence-based. As a result, Congress endorsed the invasion and Bush was given the green light.
Now, of course, we know that no WMDs were found in Iraq. This doesn’t mean there weren’t any there; just that they were never found. Chances are good that Saddam probably got rid of any WMDs before the invasion. He had, after all, plenty of time—several months, in fact—to move them during the diplomatic sanctions and appeals placed by the U.N. to admit weapons inspectors.
Nonetheless, Bush was called a liar for misleading the American public about WMDs in Iraq, even though the invasion was a joint effort between the executive and legislative branches of government. The intelligence was shared between the two branches and both reached the same conclusion. So, why didn’t the critics also level the same accusations at Congress that they had toward Bush?
The reason is because Bush was easier to hate. He was a single person, who could more easily be singled out. Plus, he was the president, and like the coach of a team, he gets the blame for everything that goes wrong. Furthermore, the critics did not want to call attention to those politicians who voted for the invasion and who happened to be their political and ideological allies. That would have been self-defeating. So, it was much more convenient, and served their political agendas better just to blame Bush for everything.
Forget the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have managed, for the most part, to keep al-Qaeda corralled in its own part of the world. President Bush and the United States military have taken the fight to the enemy, rather than wait for the terrorists to bring the fight back to us. Forget that the United States has not suffered another international terrorist attack on its soil since 9/11/01. And forget that our own intelligence efforts since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have thwarted multiple plans for more attacks, including the exposure of al-Qaeda cells right here in America.
I’m sure the Bush haters could write a litany of pages detailing everything that the man did wrong during his eight-year tenure as the President of the United States. Certainly, he made his share of faux-pas and is not without fault on some things that have gone wrong.
But the one thing George W. Bush did right, the one thing that his enemies cannot take away from him, and the one thing that objective, unbiased history will recall about the 43rd Chief Executive is that the United States of America was not attacked again after Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush White House, in spite of all of its faults, kept the nation safe from further terrorism. That much he said he would do, and that much, at least, he did.