[T]he President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value!Read it here.
Bush — despite his reputation for simplicity — did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world. And there is no blaming Bush for failing to know the difference between what sounds goods and what works well.
George Bush — the extreme contrast to Barack Obama — knew that he was doing a lot of things that didn't sound good and left him open to harsh criticism, but he made a decision early on to accept that and to do what he thought was right. He didn't get enough credit for that. Maybe he will some day. But he also avoided the torrent of justified criticism that would have fallen on him if there had been further terrorist attacks.
She's absolutely right. Dubya, as I have argued time and again, had a far better [and more nuanced] grasp on the issues facing our nation in this time than his critics. He was a better man than they, and a good [perhaps a great] president, and part of the reason for that was his willingness to accept with good grace the unfair criticism and calumny directed at him and his associates rather than to lapse, as does Obie, into petulance and rancor.
