In the midst of the four day celebration now in progress of Obama's inauguration, one foreign commentator (here, reprinted from the Australian) takes the time to assess the Bush Administration a bit more soberly. Three points of note:
1. It's already apparent that Obama is going to continue the major Bush foreign policies. With all the pronouncements about willingness to talk to anyone, Hilary Clinton in her confirmation hearing, articulated pretty much the same preconditions that Bush had announced. Query - faced with at least the notional possibility that the last five years were not as demoniacally evil as the Demented Left has been proclaiming, how will it react? By (a) branding Obama as a sellout, (b) re-evaluating the hysterical opposition and sheepishly conceding that some of it was a bit overblown, or (c) ignoring the apparent contradiction? My vote is on (c), with the pendant that every problem that Obama cannot surmount will be blamed on his predecessor, every triumph credited to him. (a) is possible, but very unlikely. (b) is out of the question. The Demented Left has been living on myth for forty years. Myth is not susceptible to revision.
2. The author notes one interesting fact that does occasionally sound above the cacophony, that Bush is by miles the most Afro-centric President in US history - three times the aid to the sub-Saharan region as Clinton. I hope Obama continues with this.
3. The author also notes (correctly, in my opinion) the reason for the difficulty in appraising the successes and failures of the Bush Administration - the virulent attitude of too many elements of the US media, particularly the New York Times. Its editors and columnists have needed rabies tests for nearly four years now. (The notorious editorial it ran in August 2007, demanding instant withdrawal from Iraq and blandly accepting the inevitability of carnage as a result, was one of the most shameful in its history. Although events have proven the editorial dead wrong, to the best of my knowledge, it has never retreated or retracted a word of it.)
I don't know what history will say about the Bush Administration. But since there aren't all that many demons in actual history, I suspect it will draw a sort of balance. At least some Iraqi journalists see some positives.
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