Hindsight Will Help Us See Through The Bush

Hindsight Will Help Us See Through The Bush

By: Rachel Marsden

WASHINGTON, DC -- George Bush is still right. While his critics assume the kiss-your-behind-goodbye position and reach for the barf bag with every bit of turbulence -- he remains focused on the ultimate objective of his political journey.

During a chat session at Washington, D.C.'s Heritage Foundation with White House press corps journalist Bill Sammon -- who has interviewed Bush more than any other reporter and has just parlayed that access into a new book, The Evangelical President -- he said that while Bush has done some things wrong, it doesn't happen every single day, as some of his media colleagues would have you believe.

Sammon, a registered Independent who brings the usually foreign concept of fairness to journalism, also suggests that events like the execution of Saddam Hussein and the capture of al-Qaida's Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the man largely responsible for triggering sectarian violence in Iraq -- will eventually loom larger in retrospect than, for example, Dick Cheney shooting his pal during a hunting trip.

Greatness usually appears in the rear-view mirror. Winston Churchill was dismissed as a nut when he first warned the world about Hitler. We all know how that movie ended.

Ronald Reagan hit a 42% approval rating in 1983, as unemployment peaked prior to his visionary Reaganomics policy kicking in. When he died, you'd think the previously critical liberal media had spent a lifetime partying with the guy.

Poor GOP Senator Joe McCarthy was persecuted and vilified for audaciously suggesting the U.S. government was rife with communist spies at its highest level. Now that the VENONA Project has successfully decoded encrypted Soviet communications, we know his assessment was bang-on.

Even president Jimmy Carter -- who let American hostages rot in Iran for 444 days and was drop-kicked from office with a 39% approval rating that year -- went on to win a Nobel Prize for his, um, efforts.

But the media has spent so much time and effort trying to portray Bush as a dolt -- making fun of his bungling of the English language, even though any political strategist ought to recognize this as a play ripped from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War". Meanwhile, as Sammon points out, his Iraq War policy will even continue if Hillary Clinton, the overwhelmingly favoured Democratic nominee, should become president.

Bush's policies even preclude recent major political changes in Europe, despite an article in this week's New York Observer saying of European conservative victories: "...a moribund economy and a general sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo fuelled the victories of candidates whose pro-free market reform credentials were more important than [candidates'] pro-Americanism."

In countries like France, these changes in government centred largely on immigration and culture. And I suppose there's absolutely no blatantly obvious correlation between the types of folks Bush is chasing down in the war on terror and French President Sarkozy's pre-election statement that in France "we're not polygamist, we don't practice female circumcision, and we don't slaughter sheep in our apartment."

And there couldn't possibly be a connection between Bush's war on terrorism and conservative victories in Switzerland and Germany amid public opposition to the emergence of certain places of worship.

For Bush's critics to have to admit that his vision has even caught on in France would likely be too much to take.

George W. Bush is the Winston Churchill of our time. Don't see it? Keep an eye on that rear-view mirror.

PUBLISHED: TORONTO SUN (October 29/07)