What Bush Got Right

Here's more from my buddy Fareed Zakaria. He wrote the cover story for last week's Newsweek entitled "What Bush Got Right". As a registered Bush hater, it was refreshing for me to read about some of the better aspects of the administration. There's plenty of criticism (obviously there's plenty to criticize), but I thought it was a productive review of the last 8 years. Here are the last two paragraphs, which I think sum up why this article is worth reading.

So why offer this corrective? Because we cannot go back to 2001. The next president will inherit the world as it is in 2009. He will have to examine the Bush administration's policies as they stand in January 2009—not as they were in 2001 or 2002 or 2003—and decide how to accept, modify and alter them. There was a U.S. president who came into office convinced that everything his predecessor had done was feckless, stupid, ill-informed and venal. He rejected and tried to reverse everything that he could, almost as an article of faith. Before he had even examined the policies carefully, he knew that they had to be changed. The base of his party was delighted by his clarity and fighting spirit.

That president, of course, was George W. Bush. His decision to blindly repudiate anything associated with Bill Clinton is what got us into this mess in the first place. Let's hope that the next president, no matter how much he despises Bush, will take a careful look at his administration's policies, America's interests, and the world beyond and do the right thing for the country and its future.

Check out the whole article here.