I Agree

An interesting article in the WSJ entitled: The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace

Money quotes:

1. According to recent Gallup polls, the president's average approval rating is below 30% -- down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.

This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."

2. Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.

It gets repeated over and over again: Bush is the worst President. Bush is a liar. The sheer amount of repetion in the media and amongst the American and European literati has made it "true" in the eyes of many around the world.

But let's just take one slice - foreign policy - and look at the scorecard between Bush and Clinton, whom the same group of people seem to have little problem:

Clinton

The good: Leading the UN Bosnian mission and stopping the genocide

The so so: Trying really hard to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal but failing, kicking the ball down the road with North Korean nukes.

The bad: Failure to stop genocide in Rwanda, allowing Al Queda to grow unabated, allowing Pakistan to develop a nuke, overseeing failed sanction regime in Iraq.

Bush

The good: sticking to his guns on the surge and salvaging a fragile peace in Iraq, removing the Taliban from power and disrupting Al Queda's base of operations, preventing more widespread follow up terrorist attacks after 9/11, successfully discouraging Libya from pursuing WMDs.

The so so: Initial invasion of Iraq - the jury will be out on this for years to come, North Korean testing nukes and then agreeing to dismantle them.

The bad: Inability to leverage the Iraq War with allies in the UN, failure from 04-06 to identify and slow/stop the insurgency, not capturing or killing the top Al Queda leadership, empowering Iran in the region and kicking the issue of Iranian nukes to the next President, inability to alienate radical leftist leaders in South America such as Morales in Bolivia and Chavez in Venezuela, overly trusting Putin and not getting anything in return.

The left has treated Bush like shit since day 1. They accused him of stealing the election and like a bunch of stubborn children refused to support any policy he tried to push forward. It's tough to work that way. And even when faced with the biggest and most important issue of our day - the potentially existential threat of a small dedicated terrorist group getting their hands on WMDs - the left, for the most part, was concerned more with proving Bush a liar than pondering how the hell we're going to prevent this from happening. I just hope the right doesn't treat Obama with the same level of disdain.