OSC reviews George W. Bush's 'Decision Points' memoir

http://www.hatrack.com/osc/reviews/everything/2010-11-25.shtml
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I just finished listening to George W. Bush's memoir, DECISION POINTS. He
reads the audiobook himself, and he still has that same combination of West
Texas accent and muddy speech that the Bush-haters loved to ridicule.
"Nucular" is only the beginning. But he talks like folks, and that's not a
bad thing.

When you consider that Bush graduated from Andover, Yale, and Harvard, it's
actually surprising that he didn't lose the accent, or soften it. Maybe it
was a political decision to keep it, but I think it's a sign that Bush was
never impressed with the intellectual culture of New England and had no
interest in emulating it.

The book doesn't try to paper things over. He addresses all the issues that
provided the insane Left (i.e., almost all Democrats) with their frothing
points for eight years.

He forgoes the temptation to settle scores -- most of the attacks on him, he
simply ignores. But every now and then, when a flat-out lie is still widely
believed, he points out the truth -- without rancor.

For a man accused of loving war, he certainly did his best to avoid it.
Despite the false charges of his critics, he did his best to avoid war,
short of declaring defeat and letting our enemies kill Americans with
impunity.

He also does an excellent job of explaining why, though he hated the whole
idea of bailouts, he took the actions that were required to stave off
economy-wrecking panics during the financial crisis of 2008. I ended up
agreeing with his decisions, even when they offended my (and his!)
philosophy of government.

Did I end up agreeing with everything he did? No. But I ended up
understanding why he made the decisions he made; they were honorably arrived
at. But then, we always knew that most of the repulsive attacks on him were
simply his opponents revealing the kinds of motives THEY would have had for
such decisions. Cynical, arrogant, and stupid (as they have shown in the two
years since they came to the ascendancy), they assumed that Bush was, too.

But he wasn't.

I already thought he was a great president -- measured by what he did with
the crises and events he was given to deal with -- but by the end of
DECISION POINTS I realized that he was something much harder to find in
politics: he is a good, kind, and patient man. He is not afraid to face his
own mistakes and tell what he (and we) can learn from them. Nor does he toot
his own horn. He was President; he made choices; some of them worked
brilliantly, some of them were adequate, and some few of them were wrong.
But history will judge, as I judge now, that his mistakes were astonishingly
few, and his achievements large.

I get asked why, if I admire Bush so much, I'm still a Democrat. The reason
is simple: I keep hearing Republicans condemn Bush for not being
conservative enough. But after hearing his reminders of what he achieved and
what he tried for, and how he managed to fight two wars and two recessions
while shrinking the deficit and keeping taxes relatively low, I wonder what
fairy godmother these Republicans think should have been President instead.

In the real world, Bush was that marvelous thing: A conservative with the
sense to compromise and achieve the possible instead of insisting on the
impossible and accomplishing nothing.
And if the Republicans don't come up with somebody as moderate as George W.
Bush in 2012, so that independents and moderate Democrats like me have
somebody to vote for, they're going to force us to reelect Obama against our
will.

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |

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