The Anchoress

I got this in an email, and I appreciated reading it: a fellow named Sameh El-Shahat - writing in a “have your say” space in the UK Telegraph - writes (and videos, charmingly) of George W. Bush:

Whatever happened to leadership and honesty as presidential traits? I happen to believe that the only leader in the West to have these two admirable qualities in droves is the leader of the free world: George W Bush.
[...]
Take the Iraq war for example. OK, so he got us into Iraq in the first place. But for Pete’s sake, he’s the leader of the world’s only superpower. He needs to take decisions, even if sometimes they have nasty consequences - which is far better than we do in Europe, where we enjoy dithering not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Something had to be done about Iraq and our government was all for attacking it too. So let’s not blame G.W. for the war.

And when things did go wrong in Iraq, and there were calls to pull out, Mr Bush just followed his own counsel and doubled his bet with the Surge.

And he was right because Iraq is in a relatively better shape today than it ever was and Al Qa’eda is a shadow of its former self in that country.

This is a man who has the courage of his convictions.

Let’s not forget how Europe does wars.

Usually we wait and wait until the enemy starts attacking, then we let them win a bit, then we fight until we are tired, then we just call the US to come over to clean our mess. That is what happened in WWI, WWII, and the Balkans.

Bush is just showing us what a bunch of dangerous ditherers we are and we hate him for it. Naturally.

Thanks, Mr. El-Shahat! It is awfully good to hear from someone over the pond, and it takes a deal of courage to write this (and make the video) in a world where it is so much easier (and requires no brave heart at all) to simply bash the man and not look at what he has accomplished. The press can’t do it; they have invested everything in their anti-Bush narratives. But regular people can do it.

Writes El-Shahat:

Hating George W. Bush is not only dull and unoriginal, but it shows a complete lack of understanding of the world in which we live in.

You want liberty but you don’t want to defend it… right. [emphasis mine - admin]

Ace O Spades (one of my several times a day stops) has more, and he even links to me (thanks, Ace) because I’ve been kind of insistent that Bush has been better for us than perhaps we may understand for a while.

He’s made mistakes, yes - some beauts - but President Bush has also promoted liberty non-stop and freed more people from tyranny in this generation than anyone else. He has done good things in Africa and for the environment (even the Iraqi environment) - things that have gone almost wholly unreported by the 14 year-olds running the mainstream media, because the narrative is “Bush dumb, Bush liar, Bush devil, Bush fascist,” and that narrative is not to be tampered with. He is automatically blamed for every bad thing, and given no credit for anything good or for any successes.

And some of what he tried to do, such as getting lumber companies to clear away underbrush in an effort to prevent the sort of forest fires currently devastating California, were simply mischaracterized as “corporate welfare” by the haters who prefer seeing acreage burn, apparently, to the sort of responsible logging and underbrush cutting Bush had in mind. Bush and underbrush are old enemies and my rank-and-file firefighter friends said it was the right thing to do, that Bush knew what he was talking about, but he’s a moronic-evil-genius, so they must have been wrong.

He’s been an abused gentleman, who has not returned-in-kind, and we’ll miss him more than we now realize, when he’s gone.

If it were possible, I’d vote for him again, but since it is not, I look forward to Bush’s leaving. He’ll naturally be blamed for everything that goes wrong over the next 6 years (I recall the Clinton’s blamed any bad news on “12 years of Republican rule” until about 1998) and he will continue to be hated, reviled and lied about by the people who have given themselves over to hate, but he’s earned his rest.

After him, the deluge.