Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Bush's Dead Certainty

Bush contends that history cannot judge his presidency until long after he’s dead. Historians are still debating about George Washington, Bush contends, so how can they presume to render a verdict without the vantage point of time. Bush is not entirely wrong here, but he is betraying a glaring contradiction: how can he be dead certain that he will be vindicated by history when his perspective is inevitably subject to the same limitations he is imposing on his critics? How can he be sure that the chaos in Iraq will inevitably organize itself in the direction he envisions?

Bush is relatively young (60) as far as presidents go. He has good genes and appears to be in robust health. It is not unreasonable to expect that he will be alive for decades to come. Most Americans recognized the Carter administration was a failure immediately after it ended, and that verdict has not changed in the intervening decades. Similarly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was, is, and always will be a catastrophic blunder. The passage of time will not appreciably change these instant verdicts.

Bush’s assertion that history cannot hold him account until he is history doesn’t hold up. This assertion is on par with Bush’s numerous feeble and discredited prognostications. One thing is certain, however, a lot of America troops and Iraqis are going to going to give their lives because Bush is determined to proof himself right. The only other certainty I can think of is that Bush will never admit he’s wrong, no matter what the facts are. But hey, America’s worst president to date, Andrew Johnson, believed to his dying day that he’d be vindicated too.

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