Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Real George W. Bush

Interesting column on a bunch of Texas reporters interviewing President Bush and seeing the guy we knew as governor shine through. Most particularly, I liked the list of Bush's accomplishments, the ones liberals don't want to acknowledge:

Keeping America safe from a post-9/11 terrorist attack. Measuring school results through No Child Left Behind. Giving seniors access to prescription drugs through Medicare. Creating a record number of community health centers. Presiding over 52 consecutive months of job growth. Pressuring Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction. Tackling AIDS in Africa. Responding to China and India's engineering prowess through expanding math and science research. Responding with the surge in Iraq.

President Bush gets little credit for the important things he did right, but plenty of blame for things that went wrong. It's pathetic, actually, that so little attention has been paid to the compassionate part of his conservatism and too much time has been spent castigating him for not being nice to terrorists.