What can we conclude from all this pious and sanctimonious blather???
For sure, the Bush fan club is easily impressed by breeding and manners,
rather than measurable achievement.
Let's see:
* He was the Navy's youngest such when commissioned as an aviator.
* He flew 58 combat missions in World War II, earning three Air Medals and a Distinguished Flying Cross.
* He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Yale.
* After working a few years as a salesman in oil, he co-founded a successful oil company.
* He chaired the Republican National Committee and worked to defend the party when Richard Nixon's Watergate culpabilities threatened the party itself, even as he had to become one of the top Republicans to tell Nixon resignation was his best course.
* He ran the CIA for a year and was credited with restoring the agency's morale (huge in the wake of the Church Committee hearings) before handing off to E. Henry Kinoche, who handed off to Stansfield Turner.
* He
did prosecute Operation Desert Storm itself successfully and swiftly, on the terms he laid out for it, after building its support coalition.
* He didn't exactly put the Cold War in its grave (Ronald Reagan dug the grave) but he was smart enough not to move too many muscles as the Soviet Empire and most of the Communist world collapsed at last. Most of us could think of others who'd have botched the job.
It doesn't equal beatification, canonisation, or sanctification to grant Bush his due as a genuinely decent man who wasn't a truly great president, was too often malleable as a politician, and thought absolutely nothing as regards the continuing metastasis of the State (he was anything but a man who believed in limited government and would probably have been stuck for an answer if you asked him the distinction between a properly-construed government and the improperly consecrated State), but to suggest he had no measurable achievement in his life is disingenuous. In and of itself, all things considered, it's achievement itself to remain a decent man in a profession as indecent as politics.
