Jeffrey Scott Shapiro has a piece in today's Wall Street Journal titled "The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace." It's worth reading, the but the key argument is summed up here:
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Sorry, but I don't buy it - not at all. Sure, you can make a reasonable argument that some of the attacks - perhaps many of the attacks - went way beyond the bounds of propriety. But President Bush brought this on himself through a lack of leadership, not by "trying his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time." For all intents and purposes, the President abdicated the bully pulpit a long time ago. That, coupled with the simple but sad fact that he has often been spectacularly inarticulate when the occasion demanded eloquence, created a vacuum - a void, if you will - where he might as well have been wearing a big bull's eye on his back.
So don't hand me this sob song about how cruelly the President has been treated. And don't even get me started on the Harry S. Truman comparisons. What happened yesterday is, at least indirectly, attributable to what has happened during the past eight years. There was a void in leadership, and in my view the Bush Administration deserved to be repudiated.
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