W

Lost amid the cacophony of the lies emanating from the scandals perpetuated by the White House is the fact that the much-vilified former president, George W. Bush, has faded from memory.  Long the whipping boy of not only the Left but also the incumbent, W has been all but forgotten by the pundits who reveled in lambasting him or showing how the foibles of the present administration could be traced back to problems from the Bush era.  At least for now, W's reign as the flogging post is over.

And that's how it should be.  W was far from perfect.  Katrina, WMD's, his malapropisms, his folksy ways with foreign leaders -- it all combined to make Bush the laughing stock of the MSM.  But when the ledgers are balanced for Bush and Obama, Bush is going to look better than Obama, and it won't be close.

Bush had a quiet dignity about him.  Sure, he was goofy at times, but in that he was real.  His creation of near-words, his mistakes when talking with press, actually made him more like the electorate than Obama, ironically, because Obama was supposed to be the man of the people and Bush was supposed to be the distant elitist.  Obama is a gifted speaker, no doubt, but he comes across as leaden, more programmed than natural.  Although the MSM laughs about it, his use of teleprompters is actually laughable.  For someone allegedly as gifted as he is, Obama can't talk extemporaneously, or won't.

Obama's gaffes are glossed over.  Whether it be about speaking Austrian or visiting fifty-seven states during a campaign, the MSM is quick with the excuses.  Bush was given no such quarter.  He was dumb.  He was a blockhead.  No one ever confused Bush with Stephen Hawking; the MSM did confuse Obama with Hawking.

Bush's main failures were his handling of the Katrina emergency and in relying on bad intelligence to launch the attack on Iraq.  I don't think the MSM blames him for 9/11; it shouldn't, because Bill Clinton could have taken care of that years ago had he had testicular fortitude.  Sure, he declared Mission Accomplished prematurely.  But what of Obama's failures?

He promised during the 2008 campaign that he'd close Gitmo.  It remains open today.  He declared he'd pull out the troops within a couple of years; they're not scheduled to return until next year, some six years after his promise, and in so announcing gave the enemy our battle plan.  His use of drone strikes exceeds whatever overreaching the Bush administration -- that evil cabal comprised of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- ever committed, going so far as to target American citizens without court authority (I actually agree with this; traitors do not deserve Due Process, even though as a lawyer I would argue they do).  In military matters, think how Bush would have been pilloried by the MSM had he done these things.

Scandals abound in the second term:  Syria, Benghazi, the IRS, the AP, the rollout of Obamacare, the NSA spying. One of Bush's failures, according to his critics, was the reliance of flawed intelligence to attack Iraq.  First, Obama permitted leaks to occur and sanctioned spying on American citizens and foreign leaders under the authority of the Patriot Act which he criticized as a senator.  But there were also plenty of other grounds for attacking Iraq, not the least of which were attacks on US warplanes in the no-fly zones by the Iraqis.

Obama's flawed policy toward the Muslim world has caused more wars to flare up than at any time under Bush's two terms.  The President who apologized for American policy has confusedly been involved in Libya, Egypt and Syria with no clear definition of America's position.  No one ever mistook Bush's policy in the region.

There were no complaints about transparency in the Bush White House.  Now, even admirers of the present chief of state complain that the transparency of this White House is opaque at best.  Lies are tossed around like pennies.  The President, clearly a smart and educated man, knows nothing about the goings-on in his administration until he reads about it in the newspapers.  Recent revelations are proving that those statements are at best a fib and at worst an outright lie.  His recent restatement about what he meant about insurance policies under Obamacare plainly contradicts what he said repeatedly in the run-up to the rollout.  Bush never lied, but if he did, he didn't do it with the frequency or the shamelessness of Obama.

Obama has caused our standing in the world to sink ever farther than it did under Bush.  People complained loudly about the cowboy in the Bush White House.  What do they call the man occupying the Oval Office now?  How do they compare his misdeeds to the errors committed by Bush?  Where is the balanced approach?

No president is perfect, no matter what we'd like to believe.  But fairness in criticism should be expected. Bush was far from perfect, as even he'd admit.  But Obama can't even admit when he's made a mistake in judgment, let alone admit he'd lied.  This seems to be a recurrent them among Democratic presidents, at least insofar as the last two are concerned.

My wise liberal friend commented to me that the MSM had let the country down when it refused to report accurately what was happening with Benghazi.  I think that assessment can now be tweaked a bit:  The MSM let Obama down by not holding him to the same standard as it held Bush.  By giving him too much rope it allowed Obama to slowly hang himself.

The trouble for the MSM now is that it has to be the one to open the trap door beneath Obama's feet, lest it be accused of complicity.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles