-Robert Fulford
Bush's billions saved lived in Africa but how many people know this?
For those Canadians who hate Americans, and believe in their hearts that they are intrinsically superior to the citizens of the United States, George W. Bushs two terms have been a radiant period, an era when familiar impulses of nationalist bigotry were reinforced by unbridled, exuberant rage. At the same time, liberal Americans who see the Republicans as the party of the devil have enjoyed eight years of intense self-righteousness. Its unlikely that either group will ever know such satisfactions again.
This is not to minimize the tragedies of the Bush years, from Iraq to New Orleans to Wall Street, or to suggest that Bush-haters failed to experience those grave events with a proper seriousness. The point is that in hard times (and our times turned bitterly hard on 9/11), theres much relief to be found in placing the blame.
It seems clear that Bushs legacy is now carved in stone. Hes the perfect recipient of blame for everything that happened during his administration. Hes made a few remarks suggesting that he dreams of
a reversal in opinion resembling the moral upgrade that time eventually conveyed on Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, both of them much-derided in office. That hope has grown increasingly wan.
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Eight facts that burnish Bush's record
- David Frum
With the U.S. economy in crisis, George W. Bushs already slumping popularity levels have sagged even deeper. This summer, his own political party kept him away from its national convention in St. Paul. The President himself has been reduced to wistful hopes that history will somehow justify him.
At this low point, some counterbalance:
1) Even as you read this, Indian commandos are waging a deadly urban battle against Islamic terrorists. Those soldiers have almost certainly trained with U.S. Rangers or Marines part of an intensifying U.S.-India security partnership that has been one of the most signal foreign policy successes of the Bush years. Otto von Bismark is supposed to have said that the most important geopolitical fact of the 20th century would be that the United States and Great Britain spoke the same language. Bushs strategic entente with India may well prove the most important geopolitical fact of the 21st.
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A 'rather successful' president with some serious achievements under his belt
-Conrad Black
A cataract of sniggering and brickbats may safely be expected as serious analysis of the presidency of George W. Bush begins, but it will not last: The historical standing of departing presidents tends to rise as emotionalism subsides.
The U.S. annual economic growth rate has been 2.2% through this presidency, the highest of any advanced country, and the economy expanded 19% in this time, well ahead of other large economies. The same pattern was replicated in per-capita income and spending, investment of all kinds and unemployment, which ran at half a percent below the average of the Clinton years and three full points below the Eurozone.
Until the last three months of his eight-year presidency, Bush avoided a recession. It is clear now that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will prevent deflation and maintain the money supply by topping up the monetary base as credit contracts. They are already kick-restarting commercial and personal lending. They will, if necessary, propel the banking system by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back toward its real function, sensible lending, and not being hosed out of their shareholders underwear by imaginative, self-destructing derivative instruments, invented by the now defunct and largely unlamented U.S. investment-banking industry. George W. Bush will not be tagged with a lingering economic depression as Martin Van Buren and Herbert Hoover were.
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