On the Last Eight Years

As the sun sets on the last full day of the Bush presidency, reflective Americans can ask: What have we to be thankful for regarding President Bush’s eight-year term?

Indeed, it would be difficult to say which is more ubiquitous: the criticism of Bush from the press and acidulous doyens of pop-culture or the unparalleled, gushing encomiums for Obama from those very same quarters. With all the distractions, perhaps it’s difficult to cut through the noise and static to come away with facts that are not diluted with venom and ad hominen.

It cannot be denied that President Bush kept our nation secure from terrorist attacks in the post-9-11 world. After those incidents, I was rather certain that a plain fact of life was that we were going to enter a new phase of domestic existence much akin to life faced by the Israelis, where terror and death on a yearly, if not daily basis is virtually de rigueur. But somehow, the nation has remained inviolate for eight years. Is this merely a felicitous coincidence? Did those seeking our destruction simply give up after the towers came crashing down? “Ok boys, we made our point. Let’s hang up the bombs, box cutters and guns and go have some couscous.” Hardly. Rather, our lingering stretch of perfect safety was, and is, thanks to, among other things, brilliant initiatives like the Patriot Act. Since its passage, this essential piece of legislation has kept us on the offense and, as a consequence, represents to the left one of the prime examples of sheer malevolency emanating from the Bush Administration, vigorously opposed from day one of its inception as a diabolical Orwellian scheme of the far right. Characteristic of the left, their enduring cries of foul over the Patriot Act are nothing but unwarranted hyperbole.

Along a similar vein, we can look at the proven successes of the Treasury Department and CIA’s use of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Finacial Telecommunication), which allowed the United States to track the financial ins and outs of terrorist networks. Again, here was another powerful, non-martial, “weapon” that struck at the heart of terrorist networks' machinations. How nice it would have been had The New York Times heeded the pleas of the Secretary of the Treasury and wisely decided not to divulge the intricacies of the program’s top-secret details within its pages! Democrats in congress, not surprisingly, didn’t seem to care a wit about this journalistic indiscretion. Singularly focused on embarrassing President Bush year after year, they batted not an eye at the national security solecism perpetrated the Times.

(Of course, the two wars that have wiped out most of al-Qaeda's leadership and decimated their complex infrastructure have played their own "small" part in keeping us safe. But in-depth discussion of these elements would keep me up until noon tomorrow.)

Tertullian said, “To forbid birth is only quicker murder. He is a man who is to be a man; the fruit is always present in the seed.” President Bush has also been a great advocate for the most vulnerable in society, i.e., the unborn. I reckon that his firm pro-life stance is one of the paramount reasons why so many on the left utterly loathe him, at least those who fancy themselves convicted feminists. Another heavy irony buried deep in the conventional wisdom is the suggestion that the Democrats magnanimously stand up for the “little guy,” the “downtrodden” and the down-and-outs of society. Yeah, sure. All the while, it is precisely Democratic apparatchiks who sit idly by as the lives of millions of unborn children are snuffed out every year in the name of “choice.” This is a fact. The so-called “right to choose,” a clever euphemism for the unjust sanctioning of terminating an innocent life, has been the left’s chief cause célèbre for the past thirty years. Will there ever be a time in America when we look back at the macabre age of legalized abortion with the same revulsion and shame we presently and justifiably feel when we look back at the dark age of slavery, discrimination and racism? Hopefully so. I believe one day we will. But how many more lives will be cut short, denied even a chance at life, in the interim? The abortion industry was inhibited and weakened significantly during the Bush Administration, especially with the addition of two stellar judges to the nation’s highest court; both of whom, lest we forget, were vigorously opposed by then-Senator Obama for lacking, as he put it, “empathy.” Sadly though, the incoming president is committed to dilating the anti-life cause, infusing it with renewed vitality and only a united Republican front in the senate will be able to do much, if anything, to abort his aggressive advances.

The apologia pro Bush I have outlined in rough form here could go on and on, to be sure. However these are the most significant achievements of his term as I see them. There is ample room for criticism, especially in the area of the economy and Bush’s jettisoning of free-market principles in favor of corporatism, etc., but that will come later. Now is just a time to say THANKS Mr. President! History will vindicate Bush and those of us who voted for him.