Proud of W.

In the latest issue, Fred Barnes at the conservative Weekly Standard offers one of the sadder, most reality-divorced assessments of the Bush presidency yet penned.

The title is “The End of the Line,” which is a pretty fair place to begin for the story of a man who presided over two disastrously-managed wars, an epic economic crash, and a bungled emergency response that helped cripple a major American city.

Oh – and Mr. Bush also helped to shred the Republican Party, one of the most important civic institutions in America.

But writing about a lunchtime meeting with the President (Mr. Bush ate a grilled-cheese sandwich), Mr. Barnes suggests that much of the public anger is the result of irrational, “left-wing haters.”

This is a popular meme these days in the right-leaning blogosphere:

Mr. Bush wasn’t a great president. But the harshest criticism of his tenure is nothing more than an irrational echo of the anti-Clinton rhetoric that bubbled up during the 90s.

I’m not a huge fan of Bill Clinton, but please. His many personal failings aside, Mr. Clinton left America more prosperous and more peaceful than he found it.

Even allowing for the terrible challenges posed by 9/11, Mr. Bush simply can’t make that claim. His own former allies have acknowledged that he wasn’t up to the job.

Still, Mr. Barnes closes with this rosy assessment of the President’s eight years in the Oval office: “He’s proud of what he achieved. And proud he should be.”