Farewell, President Bush

I never had the honor of voting for George W. Bush. Although his presidency spanned the formative years of my political life, I was too young in both 2000 and 2004 to cast my ballot one way or the other. Thus, the man who won both of the first two elections during which I possessed a significant degree of knowledge and engagement did so without the benefit of my vote.

In 2004, he also did so (miraculously and inexplicably) without my endorsement. For reasons which are no longer clear to me, I threw my meaningless and, thankfully, ineffectual support behind the unflaggingly mediocre junior senator from Massachusetts. I think peer pressure played a role, as did my rather lazy reluctance to defend a man who was—and remains—the member of the human race our generation detests more than any other, living or dead.

I was wrong then, and although I was unfair to Mr. Bush at that time, I hope to atone somewhat now and offer a feeble reminiscence of his virtues.

First and foremost, George W. Bush has been the most staunch defender of human life—in particular of the unborn—the White House has ever seen, and he will probably retain this distinction in perpetuity. His belief in the sanctity of human life, informed and strengthened by his deeply and sincerely held religious faith, informed all aspects of his presidency. Many have blasted him for caring about inconsequential lines of stem cells more than the United States troops he sent into harm’s way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this criticism imputes a viciousness to the man which requires a faith in the unseen much stronger than any of the evangelical proclivities which supposedly catapulted him into office. Arguing that Bush is an evil, greedy warmonger puts one in the position of defending the devotion to human life of such paragons as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and ignoring the almost constant vigil of tears and prayers our commander-in-chief has kept at the caskets of our fallen troops. Nor was Bush merely a nay-sayer on life issues; he spearheaded initiatives to use non-embryonic stem cells, which have resulted in great progress, and he has worked tirelessly to help alleviate the ravages of the AIDS virus in Africa.

Secondly, despite the savage, brutal and ridiculous attacks which were hurled upon him from the very day he set foot upon the national stage, he kept his incredible composure at all times, frequently flashing his wonderful smile and terrific, always self-deprecating wit. Simply put, Bush handled lava-like torrents of abuse with a bottomless well of grace. “Some folks look at me,” he said at the 2004 Republican Convention, “and see a certain swagger. Well, in Texas we call that walking.” This pithy observation sums up the whole of the Bush presidency. Somehow, people all over the world look at the somewhat goofy, eminently likable man in charge of our Executive branch and see 1) the stupidest primate ever to crawl the earth, less worthy of compassion or admiration than the Great Apes of Spain, who now (unlike the noble men held with no cause whatsoever in the soon-to-be-redesignated Guantanamo Bay facility) possess habeas corpus rights, and 2) a demonic figure, the Devil himself in chaps and a diabolical grin. In fact, it is entirely accurate to say that many of these folks believe Dubya to be the most evil being in the universe, since they sure as hell don’t believe in the Devil.

This interesting myopia—the belief that all moral and values are relative, except for the immutable and unadulterated wrongness of George Walker Bush—provides the fodder for the final point in my eulogy of the outgoing Chief Executive. In his truly magnificent farewell address last Thursday evening, Bush recalled that “I've often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.” Bush may well be wrong about many things, but in this observation he is dead accurate. There are indeed good and evil in our world, and moral absolutes do indeed make a great many people very uncomfortable. In the end, the reason Bush was so detested by so many is that he dared to spend his presidency—and his life, which he can now continue happily—in an uncompromising, untiring, unapologetic pursuit of the good.