Some of you may have been disappointed at not hearing more mea culpas from President Bush at his final news conference this week. Not that you’re going to get a sitting President to apologize for mistakes – but sometimes it’s better to leave things alone.
Did you really want to hear him admit the Iraq war was a mistake? He did express disappointment that there were no weapons of mass destruction there. But for Mr. Bush to actually admit the war was a mistake would have been hard to take for many. If I were a member of a family that had lost a loved one over there, I certainly wouldn’t want to hear the President say he screwed up – even if I were absolutely convinced he had. It wouldn’t make me feel even a little bit better.
You could pile on a lot of other things: “Mission Accomplished” (he admitted to that one), Gitmo, torture. FEMA after Katrina, the stem-cell decision, even No Child Left Behind. But even when he was dead wrong, he believed he was acting according to his best light, so you can go only so far in faulting him. I never believed that selfish motives were involved, other than self-defense.
History is always the best judge, and there hasn’t been quite enough of that yet, of course, to give us a crystal-clear video of Mr. Bush’s years as President. And as the saying goes, when you point the finger of blame at someone, three are pointing right back at you. You can fool me once, another old saying begins, but a majority of us did elect him to a second term.
The President says don’t plan on seeing that much of him after next week – he’s happy to leave the stage, and I say, let him go in peace. The challenges ahead of us will need every bit of our energy and attention. Looking backward will only slow us down.
There, now I’ve said it.
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