"Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman's rehabilitation took decades. Bush's will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama."
It's true that Nixon's approval rating at the time of his exit was worse than Bush's. Bush's approval rating is worse than Truman's though - that's why Krauthammer has to take Truman out of the list ("since"). This is problematic because Truman is the conservatives' favorite example of a president who was redeemed by history. So, Bush's way to rehabilition is probably longer - even though Krauthammer says that it will come sooner.
"Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds -- the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition."
Yes, especially since, at the time Krauthammer wrote his article, Obama STILL wasn't president. So every indication of continuity is just a word, not a deed.
"It's not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It's the continuity of policy."
Yes, Bush did his best to fix his own errors. Now, why did he listen to Rumsfeld in the first place? And why didn't he dismiss him after his confrontations with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell? Or after Abu Ghraib? And the Bush financial rescue... I am sure that Bush loved to do it, that he wanted to increase the role of the government all the time... suuure........ I guess the financial breakdown was just a small, temporary setback for Bush's strategic policies that Obama is going to continue...
"It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned."
Yeah, I am sure historians will acknowledge Bush's almost visionary plan not to destabilize Iraq after he ordered to conquer it... if only we had had enough troops in there at the first place....
"Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls "campaign rhetoric" and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek -- Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney -- has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek's neck-snapping cover declares, "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power.""
Show me that gulf! Show me where Obama himself has used that rhetoric without intending to exercise it. Just because you might be surprised now that Obama is not turning out to be the secret muslim who was radicalized in Reverend Wright's church, then married an angry resentful black woman and is soo soft on foreign policy that he gets called "Obambi", just because Obama turns out to be someone you cannot condemn to hell he is not approaching Cheney's "Vision of Power". You probably perceived Obama to be moving away from the left fringe when in fact, he had never been there...
"Obama will be loath to throw away the tools that have kept the homeland safe. Just as he will be loath to jeopardize the remarkable turnaround in American fortunes in Iraq. "
Remarkable turnaround? Yeah, who might have thought that we thought about actually leaving the country in a peaceful state after the disastrous years 2003-2006.
"Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success."
Ok, you can see it that way. However, some would also argue that Iraq turned from a powerless, surrounded puppet dictatorship to a bulwark of Iranian influence and 2nd front for the Mujaheddin.
"In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong -- the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign -- the signing of a strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq -- and ends up dodging two size 10 shoes for his pains."
I am not sure if Bush ever took that criticism. It might have been offered to him, but he turned away, disappointed that things weren't the way he thought they were. By the way, maybe the shoe story tells you something about the relevance of that strategic partnership. True, treaties really meant something, back in Bismarck's times. But that paleoconservative view of foreign relations doesn't get you very far today. Countries are not governed by a monarch anymore. Iraq is far away from showing the stability of the colonial empires of Europe. I am sounding a bit bitter, but well, in this regard, I really wish Krauthammer was right...
"Absorbing that insult was Bush's final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands -- while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.
Which I suspect is why Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor -- and his country -- well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush's policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right."
LOL! Let's be glad that Bush just absorbed that insult, he might as well have retaliated it and declared war or something. Oh and I believe, the Iraqi people are thankful for Bush having avoided these shoes. And Bush did NOT personalize the responsibility! He blamed the CIA, Iran, Al-Qaida, wrong stagecraft ("mission accomplished" banner), but he never, never, NEVER, personalized the responsibility. He never accepted it. If the blame focused on Bush, it's because the people focused it on him, not because he did it by himself.
Well, no comment on the final paragraph... it's quite obvious that I cannot share Krauthammer's conclusion, because I didn't follow his argumentation.
P.S. Krauthammer calls Obama "The chief revisionist". How ironic... considering we will have to endure decades of revisionism from the former Bush circles that continue to linger around in the press, on Fox, and right-wing political organizations.
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