Regarding The End Of The George W. Bush Era, And The Beginning Of The Barack Obama Era

This past week, my friend Penigma wrote an interesting piece regarding the legacy of George W. Bush titled "To Sleep, Perchance To Re-Write History," which was posted on his blog-site (http://penigma.blogspot.com/). I'm not going to provide a snippet from it, but I do encourage any interested Hasslington readers to visit his site and read it in its entirety. Whether you agree or disagree with his viewpoint, it's thought provoking, and it prompted me to write this post, which can be read with or without first reading Penigma's thoughts.

At any rate, here are my reflections as we await the inauguration of a new U.S. president:

Given all of the references to Abraham Lincoln being bandied about in the U.S. media prior to Barack Obama's inauguration as the forty-forth U.S. president, and given that now is an appropriate time to start the process of reflecting on the George W. Bush years in their entirety (though we won't be done reflecting on them for many years to come, I'm sure), what I'd like to share in this post is the quote from President Lincoln that springs to my mind in the wake of the Bush Administration's dubious record regarding waterboarding, torture, the Iraq War-of-Choice, and so forth. Mr. Lincoln said the following:

"The monstrous injustice of slavery...deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world--enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites."

The United States of America is both a good and great nation, in a number of senses. Yet what President George W. Bush has demonstrated in surfeit is our great "hard power," to the exclusion of many of the other things that make us great, and what he has failed to demonstrate is a reading of the world that takes into account not just good and evil, but also realism, ambiguity, the necessity for constructive international public relations when possible, the pragmatic nature of a number of forms of "soft power," mutual understanding, and the acknowledgment that for the U.S. to continue to exert what President Lincoln would call its "just influence" in the world, its leaders need to recognize and recalibrate how the U.S. displays much of its power.

I approve of a strong American military, but I also approve of leaders who use it cautiously and, if possible, with much fore-planning. There are times when I do indeed approve of asserting certain moral absolutes, but only when those who assert them behave in ways that display those absolutes with consistency, and when they acknowledge that there are indeed instances when we must recognize the existence of moral ambiguities and apply multi-layered approaches to the complex developments that spring from those ambiguities. And I do like people who go with their general "gut" instincts, but only when they offset those instincts with a close study of why those instincts are telling them certain things, and whether or not what everything their "gut" is saying is correct.

I guess what I'm saying is this: with alterations in its wording, I feel as though one can plausibly apply the above quotation from President Abraham Lincoln to the legacy of President George W. Bush. In order to do this, one would have to remove "slavery" and insert "torture," or perhaps "cultural myopia," or perhaps "indifference to the concerns of one's friends and allies," or...the list goes on. But the point is that the above quotation is, to my mind, largely applicable to Mr. Bush's presidency, and this is obviously not a positive thing.

I am not suggesting that everything President Bush has done has been disastrous, because that would represent disingenuous hyperbole. I'm also not suggesting that soon-to-be-President Obama will succeed at everything he attempts to do, because reality dictates that he is bound to have setbacks and failures. What I am saying, however, is that on November 4, 2008, my country reversed its trend of the previous two presidential elections when it elected a careful thinker to the presidency. Because of this, whatever the outcome of his years in the White House might be, the fact that Barack Obama will be my president is something of which I am proud.