Posted on 05/22/2008 5:04:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
Exactly! Support for the WOT was/is the single most important issue. He was forced to compromise far too often to keep that support.
As well it should. It also assumes that taxes are a good thing and history has never shown that.
What this article shows us, though, is that these "historians" are left-wing turds.
Those that “WRITE OFF BUSH’S HISTORY” may be the same that wrote “DEWEY WINS BY A LANDSLIDE”
President Bush is the best of all choices then, and now!!!!!
I think, ultimately, Bush will wind up in the same group as James Monroe (whom I've always compared him to), Warren Harding, William Henry Harrison---not great, but certainly not horrible.
As a history prof, I can tell you I have never been contacted in any way, or participated in any of these “rate-the-president” polls.
Since 2001, I've thought Bush most resembled James Monroe in his view of how "activist" the president should be relative to the legislature. Like Monroe, Madison, and Polk, he will go down mostly for foreign policy accomplishments.
I agree 1000 percent. He will at least seen as the greatest President of this century
So put the blamewhere it belongs. On the Rats and not on Presdident Bush
He is a leader who will not give way to threats, criticisms and abuse, a man of valor when times are hard. In this election year, when the Constitution demands that he must give way to another President, I salute him and applaud his conduct of affairs.
I suggest that you crawl back under your rock where you crawled out from
My opinion is mine. Your opinion is yours. I did not tell you to crawl anywhere, I merely posted pictoral representations of my opinions.
I voted for GWB twice. I did not vote for him in primaries. I did not vote for John McCain. I wanted Fred, but the Hitlary war room made sure that Mc was the guy (IMHO).
I appreciate the Pres, for his honor to our troops, but he has presided over the biggest increase in gum't PERIOD
The president sets the agenda, and has the bully pul,pit. He also has the veto. How many times did he use it, when our childrens' legacy has been involved.
He is just a patriotic socialist, to me! It's just MY opinion. Your mileage may vary, but you might want to check those comments!
The cost of the Iraq War, in lives and dollars and squandered opportunities, ought to far outweigh the possibility that a long-term American presence might push the Middle East in a direction it was headed anyway. But when things work out in the long run—and especially when we can claim the credit—Americans tend to forgive their leaders for the crimes and errors of the moment.
That’s why—to judge by the rankings that historians and pollsters regularly churn out—we’ve forgiven Teddy Roosevelt his role in the bloody and disgraceful occupation of the Philippines. It’s why we’ve pardoned Woodrow Wilson for the part his feckless idealism played in unleashing decades of strife and tyranny in Europe. It’s why we’ve granted Harry Truman absolution for the military blundering that prolonged the Korean War and brought us to the brink of nuclear conflict.
All of these presidents benefited, as Bush hopes to benefit, from the consonance between their sweeping, often hubristic goals and the gradual upward trajectory in human affairs. Despite our crimes, the Philippines turned out well enough in the long run, and so did South Korea; in the very long run, so did post–World War I Europe. (Indeed, if LBJ or Nixon had only found a way to prop up South Vietnam until the 1990s, they might have been forgiven the outrageous cost in blood and treasure, and remembered as Trumanesque heroes rather than as goats.)
But these well-respected presidents have benefited, as well, from the American tendency to overvalue activist leaders. So a bad president like Wilson is preferred, in our rankings and our hearts, to a good but undistinguished manager like Calvin Coolidge. A sometimes impressive, oft-erratic president like Truman is lionized, while the more even-keeled greatness of Dwight D. Eisenhower is persistently undervalued. John F. Kennedy is hailed for escaping the Cuban missile crisis, which his own misjudgments set in motion, while George H. W. Bush, who steered the U.S. through the fraught final moments of the Cold War with admirable caution, is caricatured as a ditherer who needed Margaret Thatcher around to keep him from going wobbly.
That paragraph on Wilson and Coolidge, Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush Sr. may be particularly interesting for historians.
I guess Douthat's idea in a nutshell is that Bush's reputation will rise if things turn out well in the Middle East, but that would also mean a renewed acceptance of the idea of the activist, idealist, crusading, "imperial Presidency."
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